Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

4. To help you explore these five, ask:

What significant changes has this company gone through in the past five years? What values are sacred to this company?

What characterizes the most successful employees this company has? What future changes do you see in the work here?

Who do you see as your allies, colleagues, or competitors in this business?

5. In any good-size organization, you will often be amazed at how little attention your superiors pay to your noteworthy accomplishments, and how little they are aware at the end of the year that you really are entitled to a raise, based on the profits you have brought in. Noteworthy your accomplishments may be, but no one is taking notes … unless you do. You may even need to be the one who brings up the subject of a raise or promotion. Waiting for the employer to bring this up may never happen.

1. One job-hunter said his interviews always began with the salary question, and no matter what he answered, that ended the interview. Turned out, this job-hunter was doing all the interviewing over the phone. That was the problem. Once he went face to face, salary was no longer the first thing discussed in the interview.

1. http://paulassoap.com

1. The title of this poem is “The Road Not Taken,” from The Poetry of Robert Frost , edited by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1916, 1969. Incidentally, the late M. Scott Peck’s classic, The Road Less Traveled , took its title from this poem.

2. Yes, I know that is bad grammar. But press on: if you want to explore testing in any more depth, there is an excellent course online, from S. Mark Pancer, at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, at www.wlu.ca/page.php?grp_id=265&p=2941 . Pay special attention to Lectures 1 and 19.

3. See www.personalitydesk.com and similar websites.

4. Archimedes (ca. 235 BCE), Greek inventor, mathematician, and physicist.

2. If this kind of financial figuring is not your cup of tea, find a buddy, friend, relative, family member, or anyone, who can help you do this. If you don’t know anyone who could do this, go to your local church, synagogue, religious center, social club, gym, or wherever you hang out, and ask the leader or manager there, to help you find someone. If there’s a bulletin board, put up a notice on the bulletin board.

3. If you have extra household expenses, such as a security system, be sure to include the quarterly (or whatever) expenses here, divided by three.

4. Your checkbook stubs and/or online banking records will tell you a lot of this stuff. But you may be vague about your cash or credit card expenditures. For example, you may not know how much you spend at the supermarket, or how much you spend on gas, etc. But there is a simple way to find out. Just carry a little notepad and pen around with you for two weeks or more, and jot down everything you pay cash (or use credit cards) for—on the spot, right after you pay it. At the end of those two weeks, you’ll be able to take that notepad and make a realistic guess of what should be put down in these categories that now puzzle you. (Multiply the two-week figure by two, and you’ll have the monthly figure.)

5. Incidentally, for U.S. citizens, looking ahead to next April 15, be sure to check with your local IRS office or a reputable accountant to find out if you can deduct the expenses of your job-hunt on your federal (and state) income tax returns. At this writing, some jobhunters can, if—big IF—this is not your first job that you’re looking for, if you haven’t been unemployed too long, and if you aren’t making a career-change. Do go find out what the latest “ifs” are. If the IRS says you are eligible, keep careful receipts of everything related to your job-hunt, as you go along: telephone calls, stationery, printing, postage, travel, etc.

6. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or “MBTI ®,” measures what is called psychological type . For further reading about this, see:

Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger, Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type (Revised and Updated). Fourth Edition. 2007. Little, Brown & Company, Inc. For those who cannot obtain the MBTI ®, this book includes a method for readers to identify their personality types. This is one of the most popular career books in the world. It’s easy to see why. Many have found great help from the concept of personality type, and the Tiegers are masters in explaining this approach to career-choice. Highly recommended.

Donna Dunning, What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path . 2010. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. This is a dynamite book on personality type. Donna Dunning’s knowledge of “Type” is encyclopedic!

David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types . 1984. Includes the Keirsey Temperament Sorter—again, for those who cannot obtain the MBTI ®(Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)—registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press.

7. If you resist this idea of cutting down the territory—if you feel you could be happy anywhere just as long as you were using your favorite skills—then you’ll have to go visit them all. Good luck! We’ll see you in about forty-three years.

1. See “Demographics of Atheism” in Wikipedia. Also see the Pew Research Center findings, at http://tinyurl.com/3kk78zu

1. Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller. “Job Search, Emotional Well-Being and Job Finding in a Period of Mass Unemployment: Evidence from High-Frequency Longitudinal Data.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , March 8, 2011. Found on the Web at http://tinyurl.com/4olmpj9 .

2. It thus distinguishes itself from the much more serious clinical depression, which often has a lifelong history, and which requires treatment, particularly when a person is entertaining endangering thoughts, such as suicide. In such a case, an individual should seek competent psychological or psychiatric help. ( For immediate help, this minute, call 1-800-273-8255or go online to www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org . There are counselors 24/7 at both places who deal with anyone, including the military or veterans, in trouble.)

Clinical depression is an emotional illness of uncertain origin and cure. If we are the victims of this kind of depression, it usually antedates our period of unemployment, and is something we have wrestled with for some time. Many brave souls have endured this “dark night of the soul” for years, with astounding courage—even when the medicines and treatments that usually hold depression completely, or mostly, at bay, simply aren’t doing all they should be doing.

1. Sometimes the written contract—there is always a written contract, when you are dealing with the bad guys, and they will probably ask your partner to sign it, too—will claim to provide for an almost complete refund, at any time, until you reach a cutoff date in the program, which the contract specifies. Unfortunately, fraudulent firms bend over backward to be extra nice, extra available, and extra helpful to you, from the time you first walk in, until that cutoff point is reached. Therefore, when the cutoff point for getting a refund has passed, you let it pass because you are very satisfied with their past services, and believe there will be many more weeks of the same. Only, there aren’t. At fraudulent firms, once the cutoff point is passed, the career counselor suddenly becomes virtually impossible for you to get ahold of. Call after call will not be returned. You will say to yourself, “What happened?” Well, what happened, my friend, is that you paid up in full, they have all the money they’re ever going to get out of you, and now, they want to move on.