September 2004 - During recent years the idea of career choice has become closely tied to the idea of life choices. With the average life expectancy now 75 years for men and 80 years for women, and with both sexes now working for longer, the quality of how you live your life matters, especially the days you work which can add up to a whopping 16 years in an average adult lifetime! In the 3rd revised edition of the best selling How to Get a Job You'll Love (September 2004, McGraw-Hill, £12.99), career transition coach and best-selling author, John Lees, takes an in-depth, sensitive and practical look at career and life choices and the ubiquitous work/life stress-reduced balance.

"If you can fall in love with what you are going to do for a living, you've got it made."
George Burns

How to Get a Job You'll Love does not advocate job change for its own sake and encourages the reader to realise their hidden potential and learn how to apply it to their career and life planning in order to make the way they spend their waking hours more creative, more meaningful, more enjoyable and full of purpose. The reader will discover many tools and techniques for improving the job they've got and will learn how to leverage career opportunities where they previously did not think existed.

Much of this revised edition of How to Get a Job You'll Love has been devoted to ideas building and finding new ways of coaching your brain to see new possibilities for your career.

The Five Step ADEPT Model contained in How to Get a Job You'll Love identifies:

Adjusting to change. What's the problem? What's missing in your career? What changes in your life are you trying to come to terms with? This is your starting point - your mindset, constraints and understanding of what gets in the way of you finding a job you'll love.

Discovering what's possible. You and your skills. Your personality. Your goals and your choices. Discovering what you have to offer by working through the exercises in the book.

Exploring what's out there. Researching potential fields and the marketplace.

Pitching your personal message. Everything that communicates who you are and what you are looking for. Pitching yourself correctly is critical.

Targeting organisations that may be a great match for your skills and experiences. Real targets in terms of job search, not job seeking by lottery rules.

Research shows that people who make conscious decisions about managing their career and life planning tend to be more successful, more personally satisfied and less stressed. Career Management has many dimensions, including:

Discovering the kind of work you find most stimulating and enjoyable.
Discovering the fields of work (including jobs you didn't know existed) where you can make a difference.
Striking a balance between what you are looking for and what the world has to offer - setting out the steps on your journey.
Setting goals - these may be financial, learning or personal goals.
Achieving a healthy work/life balance - making room for learning, family, relationships and fun.
Making sure that work provides you with the things that motivate you - these could be status, recognition, independence and learning.
Renegotiating your job so that you can do more of the things
that energise you.
Planning for retirement or changes of lifestyle.

Key features of the 3rd revised edition of How to Get a job You'll Love include:
A new chapter on interviews and how to survive them, exploration of the potential pros and cons of different types of working arrangements (e.g portfolio and job share), networking and job search strategies, exercises and checklists to help identify skills, insight into what employers think and how they select candidates, guidelines for adapting your existing job to suit you and advice for college leavers on how to build on academic achievements.

So, whether you've just entered the career jungle after leaving school, college or university, or whether you're harbouring a desire to try something new, retrain, return to work and just don't know how to go about it, How to Get a Job You'll Love will be a difficult book to put down. You'll reach many personal conclusions and resonate with the experience and wisdom that Lees' brings to the world of work. Those facing the possibility of redundancy or mid life career doldrums will gain in equal measures too. Quite simply, How to Get a Job You'll Love is the most authoritative and holistic careers guide available in the UK today.

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