Sign Hazel Partners LLC, Hangs for Veterans.
Ready to Jump? Get a Parachute!
If you read nothing else I write, follow the advice in this sentence: Read and do the exercises in Richard Bolles’ book, What Color is Your Parachute? That is the most important advice I can give you. The remainder of this article details how Vets, especially Vets considering a job outside the military, can benefit from the most popular job-hunting book ever published.
For over forty years, "Parachute" has been a staple for job hunters. The Library of Congress named it one of their 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives, putting it in the company of The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, The Bible, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Even if you don’t subscribe to the beliefs in these books, you have to admit: they’ve had significant impact. So has Parachute.
DoD photo by Davide Dalla Massara, U.S. Army/Released Used under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic
Bolles revises it every year and adapts the book to changes in job hunting. For example, the 2015 edition recognizes that over 2 million vets have served in recent wars, and that a large portion will be joining the work force. As a result, Bolles added a twenty-page “crash course” aimed at guidance for job-hunting vets. Twenty pages isn’t much though, right? The remaining 333 pages may be more relevant to vets than you think.
If you are a military member who enlisted early in life and have been out of the civilian job-hunting world for a healthy portion of your adult life, then you are probably less familiar with job-hunting skills than your civilian counterparts.
Parachute can help you get smart.
There are a few elements of the book that get me excited. First, the author makes you part of the book. To help you get a sense of yourself and your skills, Parachute helps you summarize your special knowledge, preferred coworkers and work environment, desired level of responsibility and salary, desired location, skills, and goals, purpose, and values. The book then helps you use this information for shoring up your job-hunting skills and prepares you for the job-hunting efforts to come.
DoD photo by Sgt. Daniel Cole, U.S. Army/Released. Used under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0