Register
Help With Your Résumé
Hot Talent
Rewards Program
Contractor Toolbox

Lounge Books for Job Seekers

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE?
A practical manual for job-hunters and career-changers
by Richard Nelson Bolles

What Color Is Your Parachute? has been the best-selling job-hunting book in the world for more than three decades. Bolles offers a completely new book with an extended preface that addresses job loss, vacancies, and outsourcing and updated references on how to use the Internet in your job-hunt throughout, the 2006 PARACHUTE addresses the top concerns of today ’s job-hunters. In the words of Fortune magazine: "Parachute remains the gold standard of! career guides." Thoroughly practical, Bolles asks you questions about your mission in life. His belief is that just getting a job - even ones you are good at - won't be a wise decision in the long haul. He helps you see your passions mixed with skills and experience, and guides you to getting there. If you've not bought this yet, you haven't started your job search.

The WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE WORKBOOK
by Richard Nelson Bolles

Another superb resource from the master of career transitions and life management, Dick Bolles. Don’t buy it, however, unless you are prepared to work hard completing the exercises. It’s a very, very thorough preparation for a career transition! Your reward will be a much clearer picture of what you should target to fulfil your unique gifts and grow within.

LUCK IS NO ACCIDENT
Making the most of happenstance in your life
by John Krumboltz and Al Levin

For most of us, our present life and career circumstances are often the result of unplanned events and chance occurrence. Of being in the right (or wrong!) place at the right (or wrong!) time, of "fill-in" jobs, hobbies, broken appointments, or having a particular friend who had a particular opportunity for us.

In just ten short chapters, professors Krumboltz and Levin explore planned happenstance, serendipity, chance events, chaos theory, and adaptive career management. This book incorporates all of these as a practical guide to adapting to life’s many twists and turns and to managing our careers with more comfort with life’s surprises. It amply illustrates by a profusion of case stories how to prepare for the unexpected and take advantage of chance events, to capitalises on the most random of ‘happenstances’. This book will help you jump-start your career and life in a new, more satisfying direction. It's a remarkable book that you won’t be able to put down.

HOW TO CREATE SOLUTIONS IN YOUR LIFE
by Anthony Grant and Jane Greene

Australia’s most respected trainer of coaches and his co-author have revised, enhanced and expanded this 2nd edition. Never condescending, the content is energising to read. And it can help make lasting positive changes in
your work situation and personal life. There are 270 pages of useful, scientifically tested, psychological advice to help you be solution-focused by acting on what you want and need to do to enrich your life in an orderly structured way.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?
How to make that crucial job move decision
by Jim Bright

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Will help you work out where you are in your career and whether it’s time to
head for the door or buckle down and work at moving up where you are. This 160 page book uses examples and checklists to show you how to analyse your options logically and thoroughly and make the decision that’s right for you. The concluding chapter is very useful: What happens if… I have second thoughts; I realise I’ve made a bad move; I get made redundant after moving; I wish I’d moved after staying. This is a very good book and will help you with your decision making.

MAKE IT WORK
Navigate your career without leaving the organization
by Joe Frodsham and Bill Gargiulo

If you're frustrated with your career or if you've been hopping from company to company looking for the perfect job, this book is a must-read.  In looking for greener pastures to build a career, you are probably assuming that the problems with your current career are caused by your circumstances – the bad leadership, problems and lack of opportunities in your current organisation. Based upon this assumption, you invest the time to find and move to another employer, often expending significant effort and then finding career issues you were leaving in your previous company start reemerging.

Well, here is a primer to cause you to re-evaluate your current situation. It’s full of useful checklists, worksheets, guides to help you audit yourself and discover your real career needs and make strategic use of the career support facilities where you now work.  We recommend this book to perennial job-seekers. It is a good read, a great system, and. It offers compelling theory and pragmatic principles.

DOWNSHIFTING
How to work less and enjoy life more
by John Drake

If you are just beginning to contemplate a work/life change or are eager to downshift, Downshifting provides the guidance, tools, encouragement and proof needed to create a more balanced, relaxed and fulfilling life. Step by step, the author walks the potential downshifter through all the stages of preparation, from examining personal fears and psychological readiness for change to analysing the impact on loved ones and personal finances. For those ready to initiate downshifting changes, John provides practical strategies and specific guidelines for selling downshifting plans to one’s employer. This book will help you move from the fast track to a more satisfying, less work-focused lifestyle. It teaches you to cope with the extraordinary time commitments demanded by today’s downsized, reengineered organisations and describes a wide range of alternative options to 12-hour workdays.

Drake has provided an easy to read, road mapped dialogue that is very important in today's work scenario. He recognizes the need to communicate with the thirty-something’s and emphasize the importance of personal, as opposed to material, life. In an easy-to-read, logical, step-by-step progression he helps the reader overcome doubts and fears, and then provides a wide range of downshifting actions-some risky; some involving little risk. He has an impressive understanding of the corporate arena and the dangers that accompany cutting back at work. The clincher is his description about how to use any newfound time for increasing personal happiness.

DANCING NAKED
Breaking through the emotional limits that keep you from the job you want
by Robert Chope

This book is a gem. It addresses as its primary focus the emotional experiences we go through when we need or wish to change our career situation. These emotions can block us from seeing alternative options, or making a decision and a resolute commitment to action when options are identified, or sustaining a well-organised and thoroughly managed
job hunt.  The book has a whole section on career identity. This is useful as most of us identify ourselves by our career identity rather than our personal characteristics, family background or origins from the part of the world we come from. This book addresses situations like that and many others: fear, anger, uncertainty, indecisiveness, and the book reminds us too that physical well being is important. The rules, exercises, examples, suggestions, and lists of resources are helpful and goal directed, and most of all the positive, encouraging tone is energizing. If you're stumped, Chope's book will help you find your way. Extremely helpful content for both career changer and skilled helpers in the career practitioner profession.

CAREERS and MOTHERHOOD, CHALLENGES and CHOICE
How to successfully manage your career through pregnancy, birth and motherhood
by Karen Mitchell

This large book of 340 pages by a career mum and Australian consultant to many employers about work/life practices misses nothing, pulls no punches and provides extraordinary coverage of this complex aspect of life. It covers making the decision whether to be a mother, selecting or negotiating a work situation which suits and evaluating the nanny option. This guide is further enhanced in its practicality by a profusion of quotes from women pre- and post-pregnancy sharing their personal, home and work strategies. An excellent listing of resources Australia wide is an additional feature. The views of others – executives, career coaches and recruiters – who influence the career progress of women are comprehensively surveyed. It even includes the voices of teenage children of career mums who talk about the impact on their upbringing. A superb encyclopedia to help you navigate through the minefield of emotions, relationships, parenthood and career self-management.

CONSULTING, CONTRACTING & FREELANCING
Be your own boss
by Ian Benjamin

Self-employment as a service provider can give you the opportunity to work on your own terms, in your preferred location. This book takes you through the steps to:

  • Position yourself in the market place so that you will be recognised as a consultant, contractor or freelancer.
  • Discover various marketing approaches you can use.
  • Develop a business plan which is realistic.
  • Learn how to price your work, know what others are charging and how to negotiate with clients so that the focus is more on your work than on your fee.
  • Decide which of the various business structures – sole trader, partnership or incorporation – is best for you.
  • Be aware of the pitfalls of solo practice so you can avoid them.

BACK IN CONTROL
How to stay sane, productive and inspired in your career transition
by Diane Grimard Wilson

Career change is a transitional time often causing people to feel stuck, depressed, dejected, confused, alone, undervalued and stressed. Back in Control contains rich counsel and comfort for people working through these changes, turning an unconstructive and emotionally restrictive experience into a beneficial one. Giving an excellent treatment of the issue of emotional responses to career change, her book helps you become smarter about change and transition and reassures that the reader is not alone in experiencing a wide range of confusing emotions when faced with career moves. Diane Wilson writes with expert knowledge, courage, and compassion about job loss as a tool to finding the right opportunities.

I NEED A BALANCE IN MY LIFE
Achieving the dream of the 21st century
by Dr James Cowley

This 292 page book provides a range of down-to-earth strategies for achieving a work/life balance that often
seems so far out of reach for those both stretched and stressed. Australian Dr Cowley describes how and
why we feel as we do and spells out the steps to create balanced lives. The guidance is real-world focused as it’s written by a professional working within the commercial sector whose past experience includes counselling and human behaviour research. His demonstration of how a series of small adjustments rather than huge changes can lead to a more fulfilling life is clear and pragmatic.

HOW TO FIND YOUR MISSION IN LIFE
by Richard Nelson Bolles

By the author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, this book explores the spiritual aspects of life and one’s place in the world of work. Wit, wisdom and pragmatism abound in this slim 67-page book, full of powerful guidance. Particularly useful for those questioning their work role contribution or considering searching for more meaning and purpose through a career change.


Marcomms Hot Jobs

Senior Project Officer, Brisbane

Marcomms Contracts, Brisbane

AO4 Communications Officer, Brisbane CBD