Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of the pre-publication proofs for this book, via NetGalley, in return for my honest review.
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Title: What color is your parachute?
Author: Richard N Bolles
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Price: £14.99
Publication date: 11 August 2015
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What color is your parachute? has been published annually for decades and has helped millions of people choose careers. It guides readers through a series of exercises which combine to hone their idea of 'the perfect job' from every persective. I like it a lot. It's thorough, well-reasoned, and full of helpful advice.
My first encounter with this book was as a teenager, when my dad gave me a copy as I started to think about future careers. I worked my way through the famous 'flower diagram', which in retrospect might have triggered my long-term love of personality tests. I spent weeks honing it and enjoyed all the writing out of my ideas about everything.
About 15 years later, when we returned sooner than expected from working overseas, me and my husband bought the 2010 edition to help us work out what we might do next. Again, I loved it.
With each edition, the author updates the resources with new URLs to investigate, adds the latest statistics, and illustrates the book with new cartoons. In the 2016 version, there are references to how to use social media and suggestions about how to 'clean up' information about you in your various online accounts, ready for potential employers to inspect them. And there is the flower diagram, which still calls to me, asking to be completed, every time I open this book, despite the fact that I already have a career I love with no current plans to change course at all. It's just compelling and enjoyably thought-provoking.
This book is great for students about to enter the world of work; for those who want to change direction; and for those who just want to explore the idea of what job satisfaction means for them. I think almost everyone would get something useful out of completing the analysis of what they want from a job.
Those are all the positives. There are a few minor niggles, however.
(1) Mr Bolles' writing style and the formatting of the book are... idiosyncratic. He loves to add asides in parentheses to pretty much every other sentence, which I find a little wearing after a chapter or two. He uses bold and italics and red and blue, and even in the print edition, this creates an air of disorganisation, even though the content is actually helpful and on-topic. I find it benign, and knowing that the real strength of the book is in the exercises, am generally unbothered by it. With my copy-editing hat on, however, it's like an itch that needs scratching: on one hand I am desperate to tidy it, on the other, to do that would be to drastically change the character of the book and strip out a lot of the author's well-established voice.
(2) I read the 2016 edition on my Kindle. It was a proof copy, so this might have been ironed out by the time it's published. But I found some typos, and the formatting was in places completely impenetrable (see pictures below, from the Kindle app on my iPhone). I didn't think it worked very well in Kindle format for this reason.
There is a work-around, namely signing up to eparachute.com and using the same tools there. The catch is that this costs $4.99, which you might not want to pay on top of the cost of the book.
(3) There is a definite American cultural bias to this book. Most of the advice holds true in the UK, but there are some points of extreme forthrightness where I thought someone following the advice would not be universally well-received by employers because of the different nature of our culture.
Overall, then, I would definitely recommend this book, but strongly suggest getting hold of the print edition rather than digital, for ease of use when it comes to filling in the self-analysis tools (which are the focus of the book). You can pre-order it here