Title: The Guide to Everlasting Employability
Authors: Michael Moran & Linda Jackson
ISBN: 978-1291167672

This book was reviewed by Simon Gosney, National Head of Learning & Development for NHS Direct.

Early on in The Guide to Everlasting Employability, the authors suggest that most people spend more time planning a holiday than they do their own career. It’s an arresting observation, and justification, if it was needed, for investing a few hours in reading this concise and focused career management handbook.

Written by Michael Moran and Linda Jackson of the career management consultancy 10Eighty, the book offers a stimulating and very accessible guide to planning a successful career over the short, medium and long-term.

The opening chapter on the new employment paradigm walks through the phases of a typical career, picking out some of the key characteristics of each phase. This may feel like quite an alarming wake-up call if your career has taken a different path. The following chapter quickly gets into practical steps that anyone can take, and explicitly acknowledges that some will have ‘broken careers’. It gives readers tips and advice about how to go back to basics in order to bring a career back on track.

The book has three main sections, focusing on what you need to be doing in the medium to long term, tactical actions to take quite quickly, and what to do in the event of redundancy or if you’re planning a second or third career. As a result, it offers a fairly comprehensive guide to the main issues that you might need to consider when reviewing your career.

The first section helps you to understand more about yourself and how to invest in yourself to get the career you really want. The authors quote the famous speech that the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs gave to a group of students, imploring them to ‘find what you love’. It’s a good starting point – as the authors say, if you head straight into a job search without first ‘knowing yourself’, you are likely to face disappointment.

Part two focuses more on networking, social media, job search, CVs and interviews. This section feels really current, with the chapter on LinkedIn and other social media being particularly useful.

The last section brings everything together, revisiting the point about ‘broken careers’ from earlier in the book. Throughout the book, the authors refer to the power of positive psychology, and nowhere more so than in these chapters. It also summarises everything through the concept of everlasting employability.

Reviewer’s rating

This is a very readable book, written in a persuasive, accessible and conversational style. It’s the kind of book you could read in an hour or two in a coffee shop. The chapters are fairly short and the structure of the book takes you on a ‘journey’ through the main things you’ll need to think about if you’re looking to enhance your employability.

Written largely in the first person, it feels at the end of the book as though you’ve had some thorough personal advice from a career consultant who really knows their stuff. The book talks to you very directly as a reader, which once you’re used to the narrative style makes the book feel really persuasive and credible.

The book is brimming with practical ideas, and readers may find themselves wanting to take notes of some key actions as they read through the book. One thing it lacks is chapter summaries, but the chapters are short and punchy enough for this not to be a major drawback. Readers will find it quite straightforward to take what they need from each section and develop a personal action plan.

It’s easy to see this book appealing to readers at various levels or stages of their career, containing enough of a breadth of advice and tips to offer something for everyone. Where it really comes into its own is in the way in which feels like a motivational pep-talk in print form. It is likely to fire readers up with self-belief and energy to take action. After working through all of the recommendations in this engaging and valuable handbook, readers might feel they’ve well and truly earned that holiday they’d been meaning to plan.

Rating – 4.5 stars