Job search and career development

One of my goals in 2018 was to prepare myself for career transition. For this purpose, I read articles about career development, a background book about hiring, and practical techniques for job hunting. These online resources and books I came across in 2018 are as following.

I have 3 sources to share here. 80,000 hours is about finding a meaningful and fulfilling career that has the most positive impact to the world. Ilana Gershon’s book How people find (or don’t find) work today provides a helicopter view about hiring in the modern world. Steve Dalton’s 2 hours job search has a practical method that helps job seekers spot their potential employers and get an offer from them.

1) 80,000 hours https://80000hours.org/

If you have ever struggled with those big questions such as ‘what should I do with my live’, ‘how do I find a valuable and satisfying career?’, 80,000 hours provides a clear, constructive research method to help people find a career that brings meaning. The mission of the 80,000 organization is to empower people to look for a valuable, efficient career path that aims to solve the world’s most difficult problems (and lead a satisfying life).

Just as all the other career guides, it might not be possible to carry out a 100% implementation from theory to practice. However, there are 2 best things about 80,000 hours. Firstly, it has a clear catalog that you can cherry pick the topics you are most interested in. Secondly, it has several career case studies demonstrating what it might be like if a certain profession is chosen. It might be pretty useful for high school students to figure out what they want to become before entering a higher education. This is a guidance that I often look at during the journey of my career transition period. It even provides practical advices on how to negotiate the salary package once people receive their offer.

2) Ilana Gershon (2017). Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today

Job searching is a stressful process. To be clear, reading a book about job hunting doesn’t necessarily guarantee an offer. But a good book about job hunting helps me to pause from stress and switch my thought away from frustration. Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today is a book like this. It provides a higher viewpoint of understanding the hiring process in the job market.

The anthropological background of Ilana Gershon presents Down and Out in the New Economy more as a field research of hiring, rather than a self-help guide about job search. The most interesting point to me is that the book distinguishes various stakeholders and their roles and motivations in the hiring process. It helps job seekers to see this somewhat painful process from the perspectives of HR, head-hunters, or hiring managers. Acquiring this knowledge is beneficial because it teaches us to identify the person we meet during the hiring process. This helps me, at least, to know which kind of person that I am dealing with. Thus I could try to align my interest with theirs as much as possible.

3) Steve Dalton (2012). The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster

For those who are urgently looking for a job, here comes the practical information. Forget about the theory if you have time/resource constraint and need a job now. The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster is a book that convinced me to switch my job-hunting strategy from cold CV sending to diving into networking.

You will spend more than “2 hours’’ digesting and practicing the tactic offered by the book. But it does give you a step-by-step guidance and clear examples to craft the ideal employer list. One of the most striking idea that Steve Dalton brought to me was, instead of creating a list of failure record as most of the job seekers do, make a list that encourages you.

Most of the job seekers, including myself, document their job-hunting progress by listing all the applications they send out. The list thus becomes a list that archives all the failures as one only stops working on it when getting a job. Why not make a list, Dalton argues, that every time motivates you to work closer to your goal? The 2-Hour Job Search uses 4 categories, list of employers, your motivation to apply, active openings, alumni network availability to sort out your top employer list. It also provides a tangible networking guidance to approach those companies. It does require some boldness to realize the technique. But I’d say it’s definitely worth trying.

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(This article is part of my book review in 2018)