Courting Your Career

Book excerpt: Courting Your Career uses dating as a metaphor to demystify the process of finding a great job. It's a humorous, informative, and helpful book for job seekers, inspired by the author's work with more than a thousand undergraduate and graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Westminster College. He learned that many college students lack critical job search skills and generally do not know how to effectively use traditional career-search resources, from databases to networking. He also found they didn't relate to the majority of career titles already on the market. But when he used dating as a metaphor for the job search, students better understood the process and eventually met with much more success in their searches. Each chapter of Courting Your Career contains detailed anecdotes and advice appropriate for every stage of a typical job search, from what initially attracts us to a potential employer, to strategies for landing that dream job. Interspersed are the actual words of current and former job seekers who have come to view the search for the right job as similar to looking for the perfect mate.