Career Management & Work-Life Integration
Using Self-Assessment to Navigate Contemporary Careers
- Brad Harrington - Boston College, USA
- Douglas T. Hall - Boston University, USA
Human Resource Management | Sociology of Work & Organisations | Work and the Family
Career Management & Work/Life Integration: Using Self-Assessment to Navigate Contemporary Careers is a comprehensive, easy-to-follow guide to managing contemporary careers. Although grounded in theory, the book also provides an extensive set of exercises and activities that can guide career management over the lifespan. Authors Brad Harrington and Douglas T. Hall offer a highly useful self-assessment guide for students and other individuals who want to deal with the challenge of succeeding in a meaningful career while living a happy, well-balanced life.
Key Features
- Bridges theory and application: While the book helps readers gain a better understanding of theories on careers, work life, and human resources, it also guides them to develop a tailored, personalized career strategy for themselves.
- Offers a rigorous self-assessment process: Serving as the book's foundation, this self-assessment guide gives readers a wealth of information and insight regarding their own career priorities and strategies.
- Provides a more thorough experiential view than existing books: This book integrates work from both the career management and the work life field while most academic literature treats these two areas separately.
Intended Audience
Career Management & Work/Life Integration is a great resource for employers and career planning offices. This book will also by ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Career Management; Leadership Development; Organizational Behavior; and Human Resource Management in the departments of business, management, and organizational psychology.
Instructor's Resources
Available upon request, an instructor's resource CD accompanies the book and includes such teaching aids as PowerPoint slides, and teaching notes for each chapter, as well as assignments, key concepts, and terms for each chapter.
Meet the author! http://www2.bc.edu/~harrinb
"Back around the turn of the century, I was on the Alliance for Work-Life Progress board, and some of the board members found their jobs and offices being downsized as a fairly lengthy recession set in. I have been in touch with many of these folks since then, and they have all done well, but mainly by changing careers. What they really needed was Career Management and Work-Life Integration, by Brad Harrington and Douglas Hall (2007). As the authors note, job ladders inside of corporations (and job security) are largely a thing of the past. For young or mature adults, the implications of that shift are enormous. Specializing can be dangerous, and making yourself indispensable may not be a great idea. So individual career planning becomes on one level more difficult and less useful because the unexpected is always just around the corner, but on another level far more important if you don't want to end up stuck doing work you don't like for a company you like even less... And this really is a work-family book, which is anything but surprising once you take in the implications of modern careers: the difficulties of navigating contemporary careers are heavily compounded for modern families, where dual-earners are the norm, and fathers as well as mothers expect to devote substantial time to children and, increasingly, elderly parents and relatives. And corporate work-life policies become important for a reason that is often downplayed: attracting talent. My reading of most of the literature on the business case for work-life is that it tends to emphasize talent retention. But that may be the wrong angle if the problem is getting the right people, and planning on fairly short 'career' duration. I should mention that much of the book is very much practical, with exercises designed to draw out the reader's values, aspirations, history, and family situation in order to make sense of -- and plan for -- the future. I highly recommend it for that practical
purposes, but genuinely enjoyed it as a contribution to rethinking the way work & family will play out in the future. Great stuff!”
"Its key features develop a bridge between theory and application, offering a rigorous self-assessment process and providing a more thorough experiential view than most existing books."
I would recommend this book to students when considering their own career planning as it is an excellent guide to thinking about what career may be suitable for the individual. However, it does not cover enough from an organizational point of view in regards to how career paths have evolved in the workplace. This was touched on slightly but is an issue that is underdeveloped as a Management Issue
Interesting and integrates well theory and practice.
