September 10, 2012

Perennial 'Parachute' still guides job seekers at 42

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Few mass-produced books have shorter lifespans than guidebooks. Whether the subject is world travel, local restaurants or advice on how to find a good job, most of these manuals can help you immediately, but they become obsolete within months of their publication. Addresses and technologies change almost on a weekly basis, making last year's guidebook one of the first things to appear in next year's yard sale.

So can a guidebook first written in 1970 ever be relevant to job seekers today? It can if the book is "What Color Is Your Parachute?" written by legendary career guru Richard "Dick" Bolles. "Parachute" is perhaps the closest thing there is to a bible within the career management community, with more than 10 million copies sold. Last month, Ten Speed Press released the 2013 Edition of the book, the 40th time it has been substantially revised since its debut during the Nixon administration.

Bolles says his world-famous masterwork, which he subtitled "A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers," is never the same from year to year. With each new edition, he says he completely "reconceives, reinvents and rewrites " whole sections to make sure the self-help activities are as up to date as possible.

The last time I spent serious time with "Parachute" was during the mid-1990s, when the internet was still a novelty, resumes were strictly paper-based and the fax machine still ruled the world of high-tech communication. I was in my late 20s and very comfortably employed, but felt a rut forming in my career. I turned to Bolles' advice to help me find a new path to explore, based on discovering my own values.

This past week, nearly two decades later, I checked out the latest edition, expecting to see much of the same advice. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to rediscover a "Parachute" that was almost unrecognizable from the 1994 copy I have gathering dust on my bookshelf. These were not the same touchy-feely ideas about self-actualization from the 1970s dressed up with tacked-on web addresses and online networking tips. The 2013 Edition felt like it was written today, from the perspective of post-Great Recession employment experts who are well versed in resume-scanning systems, online social media and current hiring trends. "Parachute" has, indeed, evolved along with its readership, providing fresh insight about how to use tools like LinkedIn or Twitter to get an inside contact within a company.

The common thread in all of Bolles' editions is the focus on self-analysis. While many contemporary job-hunting experts provide clever shortcuts or neat tricks that can be used to gain access to hiring managers — as if finding employment were some kind of video game to be mastered — Bolles acts more like a strict therapist, always turning the conversation back toward the readers themselves. The core of the book is a 75-page chapter called "You Need to Understand More Fully Who You Are," which helps readers determine what they really want out of their careers — a subject that is more relevant than ever in today's hyper-fragmented job market.

One of the most prominent additions to the 2013 Edition is a Parachute Skills Grid that helps readers identify transferable skills they have used to complete tasks in previous jobs. By putting each of these tasks in writing and using the grid to note which skills were used most often, readers can identify patterns and define their transferable skills, which can then be described more succinctly in job interviews. Another all-new feature for 2013 is what Bolles calls the Card Sort exercise, in which readers can determine the "medium" in which they would prefer to work.

Some things, though, haven't changed much. "Parachute" still has the famous Flower Exercise that can, after the completion of many prioritization matrices, neatly describe a reader's multifaceted personality, petal by petal, and reveal a potential "dream job." Bolles has retained the same loose, conversational style that sets him apart from other career experts, whose writing often relies too heavily on catch-phrases and PowerPoint-style marketing jargon. He also repeatedly brings up religion, specifically Christianity, as motivational tool to improve one's attitude and help achieve goals, which may seem a bit off-putting to some agnostic readers.

Back in the 1990s, after completing most of the exercises in my old copy of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" and filling in my "flower diagram," I realized that a change of location was a necessity for me. That epiphany led me to move from my native Washington, D.C., where I felt like I was stagnating, to Seattle. It was the best move I ever made, but I'm not sure I would have figured it out without the encouragement of Bolles.

And it looks like he's not done evolving, either. At the end of the 2013 Edition, after more than 300 pages of useful online resources, networking tips and real-world success stories, the book includes a charmingly low-tech throwback to earlier editions: A page asking readers to write down (with an actual pen!) any information that they think needs to be changed or added to the next revision, and to send them to Bolles' office in Danville, Calif.

In the world of flowers, Dick Bolles is truly a perennial.

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.

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