What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles is a comprehensive guide to choosing and finding not just any job, but a job that is a great fit with your interests, values, abilities and personal needs. It covers everything from how to write great resumes and find job leads through to how to make good career choices that fit your own unique set of characteristics and circumstances.

This book is the first career counseling book I ever read. I read it before I became a career counselor, when I was in the middle of my own career transition. In a lot of ways I was my own first client, and this book helped me to understand the considerations that go into effective career changes and job searching.

What Color is Your Parachute? is full of great exercises that help you to assess your own career-related needs and understand how your personality and values impact your job satisfaction in ways that many people never consider. This book is so full of resources, you do need to be a bit careful that you don’t get so focused on the self assessment activities in the book that you let your job search get side tracked. However, the book is set up so that you can be very thorough and do all of the activities, or simply chose the ones that are most valuable to you.

I have read a lot of books about making career choices, and What Color is Your Parachute? is, hands down, my favorite general career guide. It tackles all of the major career-related issues in depth and it is updated every year, so it is always current (if you need to be budget conscious, look for the version from the previous year, it will still be current, but it will typically also be a little less expensive than the current version).

There are other books that do a great job of focusing on one specific career management topic. However, if you can only buy one, all encompassing book to help you manage your career and your job search, What Color is Your Parachute? is the book that I would recommend.