Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

Well, that’s why this isn’t just a book about job-hunting.

It’s about something larger, which we may call life /work planning, or (as I think is much more realistic) life /work designing.

Designing is more appropriate because you can’t possibly predict what is going to happen to you, even next week, much less plan for it. Planning your life is becoming increasingly unreliable in today’s world. On the other hand, when you design something, it’s like setting out on a journey: you assemble all the elements necessary, even if you aren’t sure which particular elements you will actually need, when the time comes. You pack with all conceivable scenarios in mind. You may need this or that . You may not. That’s designing .

Now, the fact that “work” was written as a subscript, above, is also significant. It conveys the point that our general subject is life planning or life designing , but there is a doorway into the whole subject, which it is important for us to use. As the subscript suggests, that doorway is our work . Or, to be more specific, our survival in the world of work. It’s the doorway, because it is the most difficult to solve; therefore, you begin with that. The other parts of life, learning, and leisure, are relatively easy to figure out, once you’ve solved the arena of work.

Okay, so that’s the major subject of this manual. Of course, you may say that survival in the world of work isn’t your big issue right now. You’re working on one of the other three great issues in the Pyramid of Life [4]—figuring out what’s going on, or what your mission on this Earth is, or how well you’re achieving it:

Well, that’s great! But stop for a moment. Think.

Imagine your life here on Earth as being like a journey in a boat down a long and winding river. For now, the journey may be going smoothly. But you are wise, and you think ahead; so you knew enough, before launching, to put certain supplies in that boat. One of which, I’ll bet, was a life jacket or life preserver.

You know you’ll probably never need it, but on the other hand, what if you do? What if you run into some huge rocks, or capsize, or develop a leak in the bottom of the boat, or head into a heavy storm that swamps your boat? You’ll need that life preserver or life jacket.

The moral of this allegory? Designing! A survival skill! You’ve got to always assemble ahead of time what you might need, to survive, should outrageous and unanticipated circumstances suddenly arise.

Okay, so what do we need to assemble ahead of time in order to survive? What skills must we learn and master?

A human’s first necessary survival skill: the skill to communicate with others, and form a community .We need to be able to tell others what we need, and learn to hear what they need. Left alone, we would perish early; every baby knows that. From the beginning of our life, we need care, help in time of need, and of course, love. Others will need this also from us.

A human’s second necessary survival skill: the skill to protect ourselves ,either as an individual or as a community, from anything out there that might hurt or kill us.

A human’s third necessary survival skill: the skill to keep ourselves healthy .We can be attacked from within as well as from without, by a virus, bacteria, or disease. We need healing skills, as well as the healing skills of others, to maintain a strong immune system.

A human’s fourth necessary survival skill: the skill to find shelter .Even if we are by nature nomads, we still need some kind of shelter, portable or not, to protect us against the elements. We must build or fashion it ourselves, or buy it from someone.

A human’s fifth necessary survival skill: the skill to clothe ourselves .Either we must know how to make it ourselves, or else know where to buy it from others.

A human’s sixth necessary survival skill: the skill to find food .Again we must either grow it, or fish it, or slay it, ourselves, or else buy it from others.

Those were the traditional six survival skills that we as humans need. But now a seventh has been added, due to this time in which we now live. And that is job-hunting and job-creation skills .

Oh, those skills have been around for a long time, but for many they were kind of optional, since many of us never had any particular difficulty in finding work. Only recently has job-hunting become elevated to the rank of a survival skill, right up there with the other six.

In part, this is because the national imperative for nation after nation is increasingly going to be: enact reforms, cut spending, take wage cuts, cut benefits too, endure austerity, reform the tax system, produce revenue, require people to work longer and retire later—as more than one expert has been predicting. [5]

As a consequence of all this, more and more people are in danger of losing their jobs, and becoming what the media are prematurely calling “a lost generation”: people out of work, and unable to find any . In Britain, for example, it is predicted that 300,000 will lose their jobs as a consequence of current budget-cutting there. [6]A similar fate potentially awaits other nations around the world, and some are already in trouble financially, such as Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and yes, even the United States.

Therefore, the maxim of this twenty-first century is: it’s up to you; you’re not likely to be rescued by someone else, anymore. You’ve got to become better at hunting for a job, now, yourself, or perish! Job-hunting has become a survival skill; else, if you’re out of work for any great length of time, you are in danger of becoming a member of what economists are calling “the lost generation.”

In light of the peculiar challenges that we face this decade ( 2011–2020 ), we must start with fresh thinking. Fresh thinking, and fresh honesty.

Let’s start with honesty: it is fair to say that many if not most of us have job-hunting skills that are comparatively elementary.

Elementary? Yes, because in job-training program after job-training program, in support groups, and even in books, we have only been taught three most basic job-hunting skills: how to write a resume, how to search for vacancies on the Internet using social media , and how to conduct a job interview .

What’s wrong with these elementary job-hunting skills? Well, nothing. And everything. It all works rather well … if times are good. It’s only when times turn hard, like now, that our elementary job-hunting skills suddenly don’t work. What a shock! They turn up nothing in spite of the fact that there are millions of vacancies every month, in good times and bad, as we have seen.

It’s tempting to blame it on the economy, but it is wise to preserve the possibility in the back of our mind that maybe the techniques we are using work well in good times but don’t work well in hard times.

Therefore, times such as these require that we upgrade our job-hunting skills. We must learn what advanced job-hunting skills look like, and then master them in practice, in our own life. This is necessary to guarantee our survival, economically, physically, mentally, and spiritually, in times like these. Job-hunting has become essential to our survival.