Happy New Year! As we begin a new year many people make resolutions to do something new and different. Such as perhaps starting a new business. This year the Career Center offered a seminar on how to buy or expand into a franchise as well as a series of seminars on how to start a non-profit. We have witnessed a great deal of interest in how to start a non-profit or a business. The Career Center has a whole section of books on how to start your own business, including a few new titles.

Start Your Own Business, 7^th edition
by The Staff of Entrepreneur Media
If you see yourself as an entrepreneur or aspire to become one this book is for you. It is designed as a “road map to help you plan a course for your own journey to business ownership”. The team at Entrepreneur provide more than 700 pages of information and lessons to help you make your business dream a reality. It begins with a forward by Jason Feifer that encourages the reader with a revised understanding of what is means to succeed as an entrepreneur. The forty-one chapters are divided into eight parts that cover how to Think, Plan, Fund, Prepare, Buy, Market, Engage, and Profit.

HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business
by Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Would you like to be your own boss, fashion a company environment that meets your own needs, and profit directly from your success? Roback and Yudkoff offer an alternative to a career path at a big firm or the risk of founding your own start-up. In this book they take a big idea from their popular courses at the Harvard Business School and for the first time share it. That you can buy an existing business right now and run it as a CEO. Twenty-one chapters are divided into five parts: Think Big, Buy Small; Preparing Your Search; Finding the Right Small Business to Buy; Making an Offer; and Completing the Acquisition.

Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
by Rand Fishkin
No one should found a startup alone. Fishkin, founder of Moz (a software provider that creates products for professionals to help client with search engine optimization), shares from his own experience so the reader can avoid the mistakes he made. In addition to covering the difficult realities of founding a startup, Fishkin provides tactical tips and tricks (what he calls the “startup cheat code”). Chapters cover such topics as Great Founders Don’t Do What They Love; They Enable a Vision, Don’t Raise Money for the Wrong Reasons or from the Wrong People, Founding a Top 5 Percent Startup May Not Make You Rich, Living the Lives of Your Customers and Their Influencers is a Startup Cheat Code, and Self-Awareness is a Superpower.

Be Your Best Boss: Reinvent Yourself from Employee to Entrepreneur
by William Seagraves
Becoming an entrepreneur midcareer can be confusing. Perhaps you feel stuck at work, are recently unemployed, or are hanging on to your job. And you want to do something more, something better, something new and different. Seagraves, president and founder of Catchfire Funding, draws on the stories of new and once-reluctant entrepreneurs and offers advice to those wanting to begin a second act in their careers. He breaks down the process of becoming an entrepreneur, explaining how to evaluate yourself and your business opportunity.  Chapters cover whether you are entrepreneurially ready, how to be a company of one and a business of many, how to buy a franchise or existing business, how to navigate the first six months to beyond the first two years, when and how to exit, and how to use your 401(k) (without penalty) to fund your new business.

Written by Richard Wright

Happy Halloween, dear jobseekers! We hope you enjoy the chills and thrills of the season. We know however, that some of you are terrified – not by ghouls and ghosts, but by scary career situations. Don’t get too spooked, though: the Career Center is here to help, with books to guide you past the fear and into action.

Scary Career Situation #1: I want to go back to school. . .but it’s been so long.
Read: Never Too Late: The Adult Student’s Guide to College
Synopsis: This book is for non-traditional college students, who may have to balance college classes against working a day job and raising a family. The guide aims to assist you in choosing a college that will work around your schedule, picking a major that will give you a great career, finding a way to make schooling affordable, and ensure that you graduate successfully. The book is filled detailed information, including a massive list of best colleges for adult students.

Scary Career Situation #2: I need to sell myself. . .but I’m not good at talking to people.
Read: The Introvert’s Complete Career Guide
Synopsis: This guide aims to help with every step of the job search process that introverts tend to struggle with, including networking, interviewing, succeeding at a new job, getting along with co-workers, and asking for promotions. The book’s approach is to begin by identifying introverts’ strengths and how best to utilize those, then adds a few extrovert techniques to round out the strategy.

Scary Career Situation #3: I want to start my own business. . .but I don’t know how.
Read: Small Business for Dummies
Synopsis: Each book in the For Dummies series strives to be a thorough compendium of knowledge, and this one is no exception. This guide is a one-stop shop for would-be entrepreneurs, covering everything from business plan creation and fundraising, through legal and financial issues, to employee retention and marketing strategies.

Scary Career Situation #4: I need to ask for a raise. . .but I’m scared of messing it up.
Read: The Only Negotiating Guide You’ll Ever Need
Synopsis: This newly revised and updated edition expands on the wildly successful 2003 original. It features 101 Winning Tactics to help you get what you want in any situation, whether you’re asking your boss for a raise/promotion/better schedule, asking a bank for a small business loan, or even just asking for a discount on your cell phone bill.

You can check out any of these titles from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

Written by Lynnette Lee

The lazy days of summer have come to an end. . .but it’s not always easy to kick your career back into high gear. If you need a boost, the Career Center’s got your back, with these books on motivation, productivity, and efficiency:

Harvard Business Review Guide to Being More Productive
The Harvard Business Review consults subject matter experts to publish how-to guides on a variety of career- and business-related topics. This guide contains a compendium of techniques to maximize one’s productivity while avoiding burnout. Topics include: Prioritizing tasks, Cultivating willpower, Minimizing distractions, Focusing on meaningful work, Taking proper vacations, Recharging with micro-breaks, and Setting healthy boundaries.

Eat That Frog! Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done
by Brian Tracy
From the book: “There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day.” Author Brian Tracy uses the live frog as a metaphor for all of the unpleasant – but crucial – tasks we tend to avoid. The book offers suggestions and strategies to help us stop procrastinating, get the frog-eating over with, and get on with our lives.

Smarter Better Faster: The Secrets of Being Productive
by Charles Duhigg
Have you ever wondered how some people manage to accomplish so much? Why some companies have such breakthrough successes? Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg used his investigative skills to search for the answers to these questions. His findings are published in this treatise on the science of productivity. Each chapter covers a real-life success story, followed by an in-depth analysis of the productivity techniques involved.

Harvard Business Review Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter
If you’ve ever left a meeting thinking, “That was a total waste of time!”, this is the book for you. This guide aims to help make your meetings more efficient and useful. Sections include: Setting a purpose, Preparing an achievable agenda, Inviting the right people, Moderating conversation, Regaining control, and Ensuring follow-through.

If you’d like to place a hold on one of these books, please visit the East Baton Rouge Parish Library website.

Written by Lynnette Lee

One of the most difficult workplace skills to master is the skill of getting along well with people. Not to worry, though: the Career Center is here to help. Our newest crop of books from the Harvard Business Review features several guides focusing on people skills.

The Harvard Business Review is a paragon of helpful and accurate career advice. Each guide in this series is written by subject matter experts and crafted to give readers a step-by-step plan for achieving the goal at hand. Whether you need help with handling conflict, leading and managing groups, or general emotional intelligence, these books can be a great place to start.

HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence
How well do you know your own emotional intelligence? This guide aims to teach you to determine your strengths and weaknesses, manage your emotional reactions, make smart decisions, and bounce back from difficulties.

HBR Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback
Do you want to ensure that you’re giving your employees the right kind of feedback – for both positive and negative performance? This guide aims to help supervisors fairly assess performance, motivate top achievers, handle defensive employees, and create individualized development plans.

HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict
What are your methods for handling workplace conflict? This guide aims to help employees identify causes of conflict, explore options for handling disagreements, manage emotions, and develop resolutions.

HBR Guide to Leading Teams
Could you use some help in getting your team to work together and achieve things quickly? This guide aims to help managers choose the right employees to build a cooperative team, set clear goals for employees and groups, hold people accountable for bad behavior, and keep the team focused and motivated.

HBR Guide to Coaching Employees
Would you like to mentor, inspire, and empower your employees? This guide aims to help supervisors create realistic growth plans, engage employees in development, teach employees to problem-solve, and give effective feedback.

All of these books are available for checkout from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

Written by Lynnette Lee

This book is about workplace politics and other common obstacles to employees’ career development and how to better achieve the latter by learning how to master the former.

what’s holding back my career?

Having worked with many training and coaching clients and observing their career trajectories, Dan Rust concludes that it is rarely people’s actual work performance that determines a successful career or quick bounce back after job loss. Therefore, he wrote this book for those who “are talented, ambitious, and hardworking but feel your career just isn’t accelerating as fast as it should” as well as for those who “have been frustrated to see others (less talented, who don’t work as hard as you do) achieve rapid professional progress”. He wants to peel back the layers of corporate politics, put them out in the open and help the reader to successfully navigate some of the pitfalls of corporate America. Corporate politics is one hurdle but there are more hurdles to career advancement that usually lay within each individual. Rust identifies those as well and helps the reader steer through the common obstacles working life puts up. His insights are derived from more than 30 years in the corporate world.

structure and layout

The book is divided into 9 chapters, each addressing a particular workplace issue that often derails employees’ career advancement. The topics addressed are:

1. how to observe and read colleagues
2. navigating office politics
3. taking responsibility for one’s failures
4. strengthening one’s career by increasing physical, emotional, and mental energy
5. how to deal with personal rejection
6. strategic self-promotion
7. creating personal rapport and how to influence others with it
8. making effective career decisions
9. bouncing back from adversity and setbacks

how can I overcome my obstacles?

Rust’s primary goal of the book is to provide practical skill development to his readers. He wants to drive home the point that talent, ambition, and hard work are integral to any career advancement, but are often not enough, because employees’ career trajectories get derailed by the obstacles outlined above. Chapter by chapter and obstacle by obstacle Rust details how to overcome them. Each chapter contains a number of real life stories from his training and coaching experience. Rust concludes each chapter with a call to reflection and action. “Think Now” contains prompts to reflect the chapters’ content in relation to the reader’s own career situation. “Act Soon” outlines actions that can be taken quickly and “Long-Term Thoughts and Action Points” challenges the reader to more long term planning and thinking about the specific issues addressed in the preceding chapter.

general thoughts

This book contains a lot of good information and practical advice. That is its pro and con at the same time. If read like a novel or in one sitting it is easily overwhelming. This is a book best taken in bits and pieces. The best approach would be to either use it as a work book and, taking one’s time, work through it chapter by chapter taking full advantage of all the prompts and exercises at the end of each chapter. Or the reader can just use it a chapter at a time. With this book it would make perfect sense to just pick out the chapter(s) that are applicable to the reader’s current issue or situation and maybe come back later to work with the rest. Overall this book represents a good toolkit and go-to resource to address specific workplace and career advancement issues.

Written by Anne Nowak

The Career Center has received a huge influx of new books. Several of our newest titles touch on the theme of finding satisfaction in your career – be it from identifying your passion, changing careers, or even just learning to be a little bit more authentic. Enjoy!

How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do: Born for This
by Chris Guillebeau
Guillebeau offers a practical guide for finding the perfect job at the “intersection of joy, money, and flow”, either within a traditional company (by making a job work for you) or by striking out on your own. Guillebeau shares stories of real people, along with tools and exercises, to guide the reader through career options and discover (or shape) a job perfectly suited to you. Each chapter covers a different tactic for achieving an objective, such as: choosing the winning ticket to your career lottery, having both money and life, mastering the right skills, becoming indispensable, and so on.

50 Ways to Get a Job: An Unconventional Guide to Finding Work on Your Terms
by Dev Aujla
Aujla, CEO of the recruiting firm Catalog, spent three years with a team researching and experimenting with different methods for getting a job and talked with thousands of people. In this book Aujla outlines a “better way” to manage the job search process. Emphasis is placed on finding not just any job, but one that “feels natural, rejuvenates you, and isn’t motivated by stress or fear”. Chapters cover how to start, finding your purpose, how to cope with feeling overwhelmed, learning new skills, networking, what to do when stuck, applying for jobs, and interviewing.

Harvard Business Review Guide to Changing Your Career
by Harvard Business Review
Considering a change of career can be confusing and frightening. Perhaps you feel stuck or frustrated in your current career, you have discovered a new passion, or you simply feel ready for something new.   This book tackles directly different challenges involved in preparing for a change in career. Chapters are by a different writer (or writers) and are organized into sections that address: understanding what is going on, understanding and imagining what you want to do, recognizing when a career change is right for you, how to investigate a new career path – and perhaps reevaluate your current one – and how to be motivated for a career change or having at least two careers at the same time.

The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate
by Fran Hauser
Hauser addresses the challenges women sometimes experience in the workplace: how to be successful without sacrificing their values or hiding who they are. Chapter titles capture well the both-and balance that Frauser offers women who know what they want and wish to advance their careers: Be ambitious and likeable, Speak up assertively and nicely, Give feedback directly and kindly, and so on. The book focuses on how to reclaim being “nice” while being a strong leader who projects confidence.

You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education
by George Anders
Anders challenges those who are tempted to think their liberal arts education does not lead to good paying, successful careers when the national spotlight focuses so heavily on science and engineering. A liberal arts education – along with other skills and experiences gained along the way – cultivates traits such as curiosity, creativity, and empathy. Anders helps readers (with a liberal arts education) appreciate the strengths they already have, the new needs and opportunities there are, how to recognize and cultivate allies among employers and classmates, and finally how to tell their story – an especially valuable skill that can grab the attention of a potential employer and/or create new job and career opportunities. That liberal arts education is increasingly useful in ways that can be surprising.

If you’d like to check out any of these books, you may place a hold on them through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library website.

Written by Richard Wright

For the new year, our newest crop of books is for people in a new career situation. Whether you’re looking for a first job, a new career, or something to do during retirement, these books will help you through the transition.

Getting Your First Job for Dummies
by Roberto Angule
For new graduates, being launched into the real world can be daunting. Fear not, though – this guide takes you through each step of the process, from determining what type of job to look for, through writing a compelling resume and cover letter, to acing the interview and evaluating job offers. The Career Center has long been a fan of the For Dummies series; these books tend to be thorough and well-researched.

Career Leap: How to Reinvent and Liberate Your Career
by Michelle Gibbings
The world of work is changing. Stable careers with clear upward progressions have become more rare, leaving some workers feeling a little lost and uncertain. If that describes you, you may find this book helpful. It is packed full of assessments and exercises to help you determine how secure your career is, what your options for the future are, and what steps you can take to stay relevant and happy in your future career.

Switchers: How Smart Professionals Change Careers and Seize Success
by Dawn Graham
Job searching is difficult enough when you’re looking for a position similar to those you’ve held before. Changing careers into a new field in which you have no experience adds a new level of hardship. This book, written by the Career Management Director at Wharton’s prestigious MBA Executive program, guides you through the process of switching careers. Use its insights to determine whether changing careers is the best move for you, mapping out a transition strategy, defining your personal brand, and using your network.

Retirement Reinvention: Make Your Next Act Your Best Act
by Robin Ryan
Most people want their retirement to be at least as fulfilling and enjoyable as their working life was. . .but without a clear plan, there’s a danger of ending up as a bored, lonely couch potato. 20-year veteran career counselor Robin Ryan, featured in magazines and TV shows nationwide for her career advice books, now addresses the issues faced by retirees. Explore the exercises in the book to help yourself figure out how you’d like to spend your time in retirement – whether through hobbies, volunteer work, or a new job. The book also discusses how to overcome such problems as social isolation, lack of income, a sense of purposelessness, and stagnating skills and personal development.

If you’d like to check out any of these books, you may place a hold on them through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library website.

Written by Lynnette Lee