Caveat Emptor

As part a project that Mark and Wendii are working on, Wendii is reading lots of job search books. Well, she would be, if there were any that were any good. First she looked on Amazon at the top 10 career books. Most of them aren't even about careers. Those that purport to be seem to have one thing in common. They're about anything but careers or job search. It's like everyone decided they wanted to write a book about job search but decided it was too hard.

'How To Get A Great Job In 90 Days Or Less' (Joe Carroll) sounds like it will be helpful. It's not. It's mostly airy fairy nonsense about your purpose in life. Don't get us wrong. We're living our purpose, and we're not against love, passion and purpose in the workplace. But you will not get a job in 90 days or less by finding out what your purpose in life is. You'll get a job by perfecting your resume, working your network and looking for every opportunity to connect with hiring managers, showing them how you can help them, and offering value.

Worse than the books that you pay for on Amazon, are the free books you can download onto your Kindle. Apparently, they're free so there's no standard for quality or ethics. In '21 Days To Improve Your Job Search' Brian Bigelow says - in the first chapter no less - "On some of the temp agency positions, I recommend putting the company you were assigned to as your employer.. In some of these cases I wouldn't even call attention to the fact you were under contract and I don't". He recommends you lie. There is a way to tell an employer which client you were with if it's likely to help and we cover it in our Resumes for Consultants and Project Managers cast.

If you want to get ahead, the standard seems to be, be unethical. 'Instant Career Progress' (Ken Langdon & John Middleton) first recommends you make sure your boss is far away and then you nosy through her files. And then "The more ambitious person with her eye on the big picture [takes notes on her activities] in such a way that the record can prove that others were completely responsible if it goes wrong. Don't forget to have a shredder handy if all goes well, though. It wouldn't do for you to enable someone else to take the glory."

In our cast on Ethics, we said, get fired rather than be unethical. Some of you know both Mark and Wendii have been fired. Both of us have been hungry and not had money to buy food. So, when we say this, we know what the consequences are. We would rather not have a job than get a job this way.

All this research has just fuelled our desires to provide you with concrete, actionable guidance, at a price you can afford, which will help you, and which will never, ever encourage you to be unethical.

Actionability

One of the standards we set for our podcasts is that they have to be actionable. There's plenty of guidance out there which isn't actionable, and we want to help you solve your problem, not just tell you why it exists. That means though, that there's a lot that doesn't make it into the casts.

Some of the information we think is useful, or interesting, or which is actionable but too short for a podcast ends up in Things I Think I Think, Mark's weekly email to licensees. Some ends up on the Manager Tools blog which can be accessed by all our members. If you'd like even more Manager Tools thoughts, you can read it here.

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