Pour yourself a cup of tea, pull up a comfortable seat and settle in with our spring reading roundup. These books were all published in 2021 and cover a variety of topics including emotions in career development, outcome-based experiential learning and the power of career stories.
What’s the best book on careers that you’ve read this year? Share in the comments below!
Canada, A Working History – Jason Russell
Canada, A Working History describes the ways in which work has been performed in Canada from the pre-colonial period to the present day. Work is shaped by a wide array of influences, including gender, class, race, ethnicity, geography, economics and politics. The work experience led people to form unions, aspire to management roles, pursue education, form professional associations and seek self-employment.
Career Development, Employment, and Disability in Rehabilitation: From Theory to Practice (Second edition) – David R. Strauser
The book provide comprehensive coverage of vocational behaviour and employment theory and intervention techniques as they apply to individuals with disabilities. Scholarly yet practical, the second edition is updated with key information and research, delivering new employment statistics, employment rates and poverty levels of people with disabilities.
Career Helping: Harnessing perspective and emotion in everyday practice – Kris Magnusson
For too long, the work of career helpers has focused on helping clients acquire information and then using it to make sound occupational choices. Magnusson demonstrates the importance of paying attention to client perceptions and emotions to help them navigate increasingly complex personal career challenges, and provides strategies that career practitioners can use to harness the power of perception and emotion.
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation – Kevin Roose
New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose lays out a hopeful, pragmatic vision for how humans can survive in the machine age. He shares the secrets of people and organizations that have thrived during periods of technological change, and explains how we can protect our own futures.
Outcome-Based Experiential Learning: Let’s Talk About, Design For, and Inform Teaching, Learning, and Career Development – Carolyn Hoessler and Lorraine Godden
Outcome-based design (OBEL) for experiential learning, work-integrated learning and career programming is a practical evidence-informed guide for stakeholders and coordinators. OBEL offers approaches for communicating goals, defining program types and focusing on design decisions. This guide aims to keep programming feasible and scalable with practical considerations throughout.
Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work – Lindsey Pollak
COVID-19 has heightened career uncertainty in a work landscape dominated by turbulence and change, and it is directly affecting how people are entering – or re-entering – the workplace. Pollak provides encouraging, strategic and actionable advice on making lifelong decisions about education; building a resilient personal brand; using virtual communication to remotely interview, network and work; skilling and reskilling for the future; and maintaining mental health.
The Career Stories Method: 11 Steps to Find Your Ideal Career—and Discover Your Awesome Self in the Process – Kerri Twigg
Kerri Twigg combines her theatre background with her training in HR, coaching and meditation to offer a program to find out which job is perfect for you, by examining your stories. Twigg also provides practical tools for networking, writing resumes that impress, building your LinkedIn profile and more.
The Job Closer: Time-Saving Techniques for Acing Resumes, Interviews, Negotiations, and More – Steve Dalton
This guide includes tools to help jobseekers avoid wasting effort, such as:
- The FIT Model, which helps job seekers answer the “Tell me about yourself” question using principles from the world of screenwriting.
- The RAC Model, for writing efficient cover letters.
- The CAR Matrix, designed to help jobseekers craft compelling interview stories.
Unpacking Outplacement: The Career Pro’s Easy Guide to Landing High-Dollar Corporate Career Transition Clients – Lotte Struwing
A step-by-step guide for career professionals who want to add corporate outplacement to their services. Chapters include “Is It Outplacement or Career Transition?”, “Employers and Career Transition – What You Need to Know” and “Engaging Your Client.”
Who Do I Want To Become? – Rumeet Billan; Illustrated by Michelle Clement
This picture book is for anyone, of any age, who has been stumped by the question of what they’re going to be when they grow up. It offers a refreshing new take on a question asked time and time again – one that has nothing to do with what you want to be and everything to do with who you are and who you want to be.
You Turn: Get Unstuck, Discover Your Direction, and Design Your Dream Career – Ashley Stahl
Career coach Ashley Stahl shares the strategies she’s used to help thousands ditch their Monday blues, get clarity on what work lights them up and devise an action plan to create a career they love. Stahl’s 11-step roadmap enables readers to discover their core skillset, clarify their key interests, become their own coach and more.
