Employment Books

The interview is more often than not the deciding factor to if one is potentially hired or simply tossed to the side. "Best Answers to 202 Job Interview Questions: Expert Tips to Ace the Interview and Get the Job Offer" offers readers sage advice to help them get through the interrogation that employers so often put prospective employees through where the correct answers are never that obvious - questions like self-evaluation, skills, problem solving abilities, hobbies, motivation, salary, and many more questions are examined and advice given to answer them honestly and effectively. Five hundred pages of well written information, "Best Answers to 202 Job Interviews Questions: Expert Tips to Ace the Interview and Get the Job Offer" is highly recommended for anyone with the feared interview on the horizon and for community library career shelves.

I do a fair amount of career counseling and have held high paying jobs at several Fortune 100 companies in various capacities. I have always found Wendy Enelow's books helpful and practical, particularly for their well chosen and thoughtful example resumes.

There are other books that go into more depth on writing executive resumes and also for people making a career transition. However, this book will be a valuable companion to any other books you might purchase.

Career transitions are often tricky and many people miss identifying some of their most important transferable skills. This book will help you to avoid that error and is worth owning just for the example resumes.

This book is a wonderful reference tool in explaining entry-level jobs. I believe it meets all expectations and it fulfills the title's promise. However, there needs to be more done in the job search. This book doesn't say anything about resumes, cover letters, or networking. All of which is vital to the job hunt. A wonderful addition to this book would be the popular job-hunting book, "How to find your dream job and make it a reality: solutions for a rewarding and meaningful career" by Jason McClure. I think these two resources together makes for a wonderful career/job-hunting library.

Best Resumes And CVs For International Jobs: Your Passport To The Global Job Market by is a very practical guide to preparing the most attractive possible resume or curriculum vitae (CV) for the international job of one's preference. From judging what to include or exclude in a resume, to the best type of language to use when composing and presenting the resume, to whether or not to include personal information, Best Resumes And CVs For International Jobs is packed with a wealth of practical and effective tips, tricks, techniques to securing a position overseas. Completely "user friendly", Best Resumes And CVs For International Jobs details what recruiters are and are not looking for, as well as providing 86 sample resumes to use as a baseline. Highly recommended for anyone in serious pursuit of an international career, Best Resumes And CVs For International Jobs is a strongly recommended addition to any personal or professional job counseling reference collection.

Kind of a long title, but a great book. College students really need to realize that they may not be getting the most up-to-date resume writing information from their career centers or professors. Louise's book can help them make up their own minds and possibly develop a much more effective job search tool. Edie Rische, College Grad Resume Specialist and Nationally Certified Resume Writer. www.writeawayresume.com

It is obvious that anyone who wants to work in sales or marketing should have a superb resume... after all, if you can't sell yourself to an employer, how could you possibly sell their products or services? Thankfully, books like this one exist... you provide the coal (your education and experience), and Lewis and Corwin will fashion it into a diamond (one gem of a resume!).

The first 80 pages of the book are packed with excellent advice on resume and cover letter writing, interviewing, and job hunting. Some of their methods are unfashionable in the current job marketplace (they focus strictly on the chronological resume format, for example, and always include a "references available" statement), but it's generally a bad idea for anyone new to anything to break with tradition. The rest of the book contains 100 sample resumes, nicely categorized by market segment and job description.

Bottom line: if you're looking for a job in sales, marketing, or management, then you can't afford to miss this book.

America is called the Land of Opportunity because people of all backgrounds are given a chance at advancement through education and hard work, but these opportunities are not available to all students.

Professor Rosenbaum has studied the educational opportunities given to students of low SES (socio-economic status) backgrounds for over 35 years. In this book, he evaluates the adequacy and extent of American vocational education programs and compares them with successful models in other countries such as Japan and Germany. In this analysis, he points out a tragic irony: due to their egalitarian ideals, American schools are uncomfortable with creating a substantial vocational education system and instead offer a college preparatory curriculum to nearly all students, a choice which ends up depriving students of the means to earn a good living.

The American educational system sends the signal to students that they ought attend college: in surveys, most students say that they plan to attend college. At the same time, students have little idea what colleges require: as Prof Rosenbaum's _Making Inequality_ (1976) showed, students were ignorant of basic college application processes. Students do know that community colleges are open to all and perceive that grades don't matter, giving them little incentive to study. Even non-college-bound students also know that employers don't look at high school grades, and so have little incentive to study.

After high school graduation, students enter community colleges ill-prepared for the courses; most students must enroll in remedial courses, which they're paying for, but do not earn college credits. Disappointed with this process, high numbers of students drop out with few or no college credits.

By contrast, in good vocational education programs, students have incentives to do well: teachers develop relationships with employers, who trust their opinions of students, and students see that their performance in the classroom has a direct effect on their employability. In addition, the voc ed curriculum is clearly relevant to the real world, and students gain self-esteem from learning real world job skills such as auto mechanics or computer assembly; making a device work is a clear source of motivation, unlike algebra.

Students in vocational education programs also attain higher levels of competence at the same skills than they would in college preparatory courses. Cognitive psychology studies show that students are often better at solving real-world problems than abstract ones: uneducated Brazilian street children selling fruit on the street are capable of solving complex arithmetic problems, but unable to solve the same problems when phrased in abstract terms.

In sum, the American educational system perpetuates a false egalitarianism through its failure to offer more substantial vocational education programs. Rather than stigmatizing students, vocational education programs empower them to gain competence in fields which are often technically complex and high-paying, and which offer substantially more opportunities for advancement than those jobs open to high school graduates.

Barbara Harris' "Beyond Her Sphere" is an absolute MUST reading for anyone interested in feminism, women's history, or just plain curious to know why certain demeaning, derogatory, and dominating ideas STILL exist about women. This book is an excellent reference source for all educators of all grades who wish to include background or specific discussion of women in their classrooms. Harris begins her analysis of male domination and definition of women with Paul and the New Testament and explains how early Christian patristic writers combined Paul's philosophies with Aristoltelian ones to form an extreme mysogynistic view of women that defined them as evil, disruptive, and in need of male domination. Her analysis continues to explain how the Renaissance, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment created more egalitarian attitudes and understandings of women which were reversed in the seventeenth century to place women back in their domestic sphere as wives and mothers "where they belonged". Harris' analysis concludes with a discussion of first wave feminism, Sufferage, the World Wars, and Second Wave Feminism. This book is not just a list of what happened when, but also an explanation of WHY attitudes shifted and changed and who benifitted in what way because of the adjustments in thinking about women. In 200 pages of reading, a reader can gain a panoramic and complete understanding of ideas and philosophies that have defined and controlled women that contribute to residual beliefs about women to this day.

As a Fulbrighter and educator teaching management practices in evolving markets, I am constantly on the look out for books I can donate to my colleagues' foreign libraries. This book meets all my criteria for useful and user-friendly. It is an excellent example of American ideals and aspirations. I'm buying my third copy; my own young daughter, a junior in high school, is ready to start the big search for a school. Thank you for this fine work.

Since this book was first published in 1996, there has been at least some progress in terms of what Vernon Jordan calls "signs of new opportunities" as indicated by the appointment as CEOs of Kenneth Chenault (by American Express) and Richard Parsons (by AOL Time Warner). However, obviously, much more remains to be achieved in a society which still relies so heavily on gender-specific adjectives (e.g. female jockey) and hyphenated descriptives (e.g. Lilliputian-Americans). Let us all hope that Chenault and Parsons were selected wholly because they were best-qualified to provide the organizational leadership needed. Period.

The subtitle of Collins' book ("The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class") implies -- to me, at least -- initiatives which were consciously and deliberately expedient. That is to say, in response to various pressures (especially from the federal government) on many corporations in the late-1960s to create access to career opportunities previously denied to black executives. These same corporations then "racialized" the positions many black executives occupied by limiting their responsibilities to supervising Affirmative Action programs, cultivating "special markets", and solidifying relationships with minority customers. In almost every instance, this eliminated them from the "fast track" to positions at higher levels within their respective organizations. Their income permitted what Dick Gregory once referred to as an "Oreo lifestyle" but job security was tenuous. I was curious to know: Was the emergence of a Black Middle Class, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, more a perception than a reality?

In an e-mail from her, she responds to that question. "I really don't think the emergence of the middle class was illusionary at all. I think the socioeconomic gains were/are real but they are grounded in different sets of conditions than those that prop up whites. I think that its emergence and growth was, and still is, dependent on the continued support of public policies and social pressure. When I look at the Ken Chenaults and Richard Parsons of the world I see them as anomalies rather than as symbols of a a trend. In other words, I don't think these companies are going to integrate their power structures in a sustained way unless there's some type of external nonmarket pressure to do so. Of course, I could be wrong and, if so, I'll have to rethink my understanding of race relations in the business world."

I was also curious to know to what the extent (if any) the demographics of black executives (male and female) have changed since 1996 when her book was first published. In the same e-mail, Collins observes: "The demographic trends associated with the number of black executives is almost impossible to measure for several reasons. One, the best source (EEO1 data that surveys private employers) groups managers so that rank is obscured. Managers counted here could be the manager of a 7-11 food store or a CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Census data does have an "administrator" category, but that probably relates more to public than to private sector employment. This problem has been my nemesis and probably will continue to be so because I am forced patch together information from various sources and than draw inferences." Although the scope and depth of Collins' survey sample may seem insufficient to support her generalizations (i.e. two sets of interviews with 76 of the most successful black executives in Chicago's major corporations), she consulted extensive supplementary research resources which apparently confirmed what she learned from those interviewed.

The Collins Web site features a statement which asserts that her analysis in this book "challenges arguments that justify dismantling affirmative action. She argues that it is a myth to believe that black occupational attainments are evidence that race no longer matters in the middle-class employment arena. On the contrary, blacks' progress and well-being are tied to politics and employment practices that are sensitive to race." That brief excerpt refers to her analysis of circumstances almost two decades prior to 1996. It remains for each reader to read and evaluate Collins' book, then draw her or his own conclusions as to its relevance to circumstances today. I rate the book so highly because she addresses so many important issues which remain timely in 2001; also, because she raises questions which must continue to be asked, and then answered honestly, until such time that there is no longer a need to do so.