Read any good books lately? If you’re looking for some titles to check out this Canada Career Month – or to share with your clients – we’ve rounded up 15 books published in the past year exploring a wide variety of work and career development-related topics. Brush up on AI in the workplace, decent work, teen career decisions and more.
What are you reading this fall? Let us know in the comments section!
Beyond Academia: Stories and Strategies for PhDs Making the Leap to Industry – Matteo Tardelli
This book offers insights from industry professionals on how they landed their dream industry job, offering practical tips to help readers understand how to leverage their PhD to stand out from the crowd and get hired.
Career Mastery: Proven Strategies for Achieving Success in Your Profession – Shubham Shukla
This book provides practical tips, exercises and strategies for self-assessment, goal-setting, navigating the workplace, professional development and career advancement. It is geared toward anyone looking to take control of their career and achieve success in the modern workplace.
Designing and Implementing Career Interventions: A Handbook for Effective Practice, 2nd Edition – James P. Sampson, Jr. and Janet G. Lenz
The purpose of this handbook is to stimulate discussion among senior managers, managers, practitioners, administrative staff, collaborating partners and stakeholders about how staff members can make the most effective use of their time in implementing changes in the design and delivery of career interventions for adolescents and adults.
Human-Centered AI – Ben Shneiderman
This book focuses on the opportunities AI presents, with recommendations for how programmers, business leaders, educators, professionals and policy makers can implement human-centred AI.
Human + Machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI – Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson
This book demonstrates that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization – whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service or personal productivity habits. AI is changing all the rules of how companies operate.
Lost & Found: An Adult’s Guide to Empowering Teens to Make Their Best Career Decision – Sarah-Jane VandenBerg
In this book, career practitioner Sarah-Jane VandenBerg shares the formulas, shortcuts, mindsets and components that teens need to be successful in today’s work world. She offers advice for adults (from family members, to teachers, to youth leaders, to guidance counsellors) to discuss those concepts with teens.
Next! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work – Joanne Lipman
Major life and societal disruptions prompt in us the urgent need to pivot, to ask the question: What’s next – and how do I get there? Author and journalist Joanne Lipman distills hundreds of personal interviews along with the latest scientific research to answer this question.
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It – Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Drawing on interviews with families, educators and a survey of nearly 6,000 parents, Jennifer Breheny Wallace exposes how the pressure on students to perform is baked into our larger society. Wallace shows that what kids need from the adults in the room is not more pressure, but to feel like they matter.
Quick Confidence: Be Authentic, Boost Connections, and Make Bold Bets on Yourself – Selena Rezvani
This book walks readers through – and helps them leap over – the nine most common obstacles that stand in the way of building authentic confidence. Rezvani offers digestible actions, behaviours and exercises to change the way you think and how you present yourself to others.
Remote Works: Managing for Freedom, Flexibility, and Focus – Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson
This book aims to be the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams, addressing challenges such as communicating effectively, eliminating frustration over what tools to use, establishing team norms and focusing on getting things done.
Rethinking Work: Essays on Building a Better Workplace – David L. Blustein and Lisa Y. Flores
This collection of brief essays by thought-leaders, scholars, activists, psychologists and social scientists imagines new workplace structures and policies that promote decent and fair work for all members of society, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice – Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow
This book is positioned as a practical, shame-free guide for navigating conversations across our differences at a time of rapid social change. The authors offer seven user-friendly principles that teach skills such as how to engage in respectful disagreement and offer authentic apologies.
The Career Change Guide: Five Steps to Finding Your Dream Job – Rachel Schofield
This book aims to help readers:
- Be clear about who they are and the work and life they want
- Devise and explore career ideas
- Tackle self-doubt and build confidence
- Build an action plan to make change
- Avoid classic career change mistakes
The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World – Bruce Feiler
Showing that the people who are happiest at work don’t climb, they dig, Feiler introduces the six questions to ask in a “workquake” that allow us to perform a “meaning audit,” tapping into our truest selves and our deepest hopes to create the meaning we crave and the success we deserve.
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career – Herminia Ibarra
In this newly updated edition, Herminia Ibarra presents a model for career reinvention that counters the idea of career transition as a linear path. Rather, on this crooked journey, successful reinvention comes not from deciphering and analyzing our past, but from inventing and testing our possible futures.
