January 16, 2005
ESSAY; The Book of Jobs
By Virginia Postrel
Thirty-five years ago, an Episcopal minister self-published 100 copies
of a slim job-hunting guide and gave them away at a conference for
college chaplains, many of whom were facing layoffs. Soon he was
getting requests for more and more copies. Two years later, the little
book had a commercial publisher, the small Ten Speed Press in Berkeley,
Calif. ''What Color Is Your Parachute?'' has since become a classic,
the ''job hunter's bible,'' and sold more than 8 million copies. The
2005 edition, with a large grinning photo of its author, Richard N.
Bolles, on the cover, was published in November. A lot has changed
since the early 1970's, but not as much as we sometimes like to think.
Job losses and career angst didn't start with the bursting of the tech
bubble or the midlife crises of the baby boomers. Even way back when,
white-collar workers, some of them highly trained technical experts,
lost their jobs for reasons beyond their control. The first commercial
edition of ''Parachute'' singled out aerospace engineers, whose
profession was ''being phased out of our society.''
The book takes its title from the idea that sooner or later each
of us is going to have to bail out of our current job, usually
involuntarily, with only our enduring talents to support us: ''The time
to figure out where your parachute is, what color it is, and to strap
it on, is now -- and not when the vocational airplane that you are
presently in is on fire and diving toward the ground,'' Bolles wrote in
the 1973 edition.
''Parachute'' arrived on the scene when business practices and
employee ideals and attitudes were beginning to shift. The postwar
''loyalty ethic,'' in which workers got security in exchange for
obedience, was dying. More Americans were starting to look for personal
fulfillment in their work, which made them increasingly likely to
change jobs, while employers were becoming more ruthlessly pragmatic
about layoffs. ''The view that there was loyalty between company and
worker back then was also a myth,'' Bolles said in a 1999 interview in
Fast Company magazine. ''Even then,'' he said, ''the conditions that
produced the workplace realities of today were very much in place.''
The Organization Man's loyalty ethic would be replaced by what
Charles Heck-scher, a scholar of labor studies at Rutgers University,
has called the ''professional ethic.'' Instead of lifetime security,
professionals look for challenges and expect rewards for performance.
The professional ethic gives employees more freedom, flexibility and
respect, but it also gives them more responsibility for their
destinies.
''Parachute'' is a job-hunting guide for believers in the
professional ethic. It starts from an understanding that the employment
relationship is an exchange, not an entitlement. A successful job
applicant is not someone who simply needs a job, but someone who can
solve an employer's problems. ''You want the employer to see you as a
potential Resource Person for that organization, rather than as simply
A Job Beggar,'' Bolles writes in the 2005 edition.
Instead of telling readers to send out résumés and answer ads,
''Parachute'' advises them how to look for the hidden jobs, the ones
employers may not even have created yet, the ones that truly match
their talents and desires. Most jobs are never advertised, Bolles
reminds us, and résumé screeners are usually trying to eliminate
candidates. The book encourages informational interviews, which help
job hunters learn about occupations and workplaces and provide
employers a low-risk way of getting to know potential hires.
Over the years, ''Parachute'' has grown like a ramshackle
house, adding resources, fine points, numbered lists of tips,
personality tests and advice for job-hunting on the Internet. The
essential argument is clearest in the original edition, which sums up
the job-hunting plan in three marching orders: ''You must decide just
exactly what you want to do,'' ''You must decide just exactly where you
want to do it, through your own research and personal survey'' and, the
key through all editions, ''You must research the organizations that
interest you at great length, and then approach the one individual in
each organization who has the power to hire you for the job that you
have decided you want to do.''
All this hard work, and the many written exercises that
accompany the research, understandably turn off some readers. ''
'Parachute' convinced me that getting a decent job was such a
fearsomely difficult task that only the extremely lucky or the
extremely clever or the well-connected could get one,'' said one
librarian who read the book as a teenager in 1987. ''If jobs were
plentiful and easy to come by, one wouldn't have to go through all the
incomprehensible rigmarole the book had one go through.''
Bolles repeatedly declares that job-hunting is hard work --
''the most difficult task any of us faces in life,'' as he wrote on the
first page of the original. But this is actually a positive message.
You aren't having a hard time finding a job because there's something
wrong with you. You're having a hard time finding a job because finding
a job is hard. The book assumes that everyone has valuable skills. The
trick is to know yourself, to know the market and to put in enough
legwork to find the right match.
More recent editions of the book have emphasized the
''life-changing job hunt,'' a search not only for financial support but
also for happiness and meaning. Job-hunting, Bolles writes, ''gives us
a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go
deeper into the subsoil of our soul. It gives us a chance to wrestle
with the question, 'Why am I here on Earth?' ''
The book's peculiar power comes from its unusual combination
of market realism, psychological insight and spiritual idealism.
''Parachute'' is suffused with the Protestant idea of the calling, but
it is not Max Weber's grim, ascetic version. Instead, Bolles offers the
grace-filled version of labor I recognize from my Presbyterian
childhood, which was when I first heard of the book. Bolles believes
God has given each of us special skills and talents and the
responsibility to discover and use them. When we find our mission in
life, he preaches, we will enjoy our work.
The flip side of the professional ethic is that employees have
no obligation to stick with jobs or organizations that don't make them
happy. While we can't expect our employers to give us praise or
loyalty, we can look for work that lets us learn and that offers
intrinsic satisfaction. ''Parachute'' has always appealed to unhappy
workers as well as unemployed ones. When my family's South Carolina
church offered a job-hunting seminar in the 70's using an early edition
of the book, the organizers assumed most participants would be laid-off
textile managers. Instead, most had jobs; they just didn't like what
they were doing.
The old work ethic preached that liking your work wasn't important. The
new one preaches that enjoyment is essential, even (in Bolles's 1972
formulation) "divine radar" indicating what you should be doing. Parachute's
2005 edition includes a chapter aimed at helping readers identify the
transferable skills they most enjoy using and the environments in which
they find the greatest satisfaction. Its title, "When You Lose All
Track of Time," suggests a purely secular reading of Parachute's search for meaningful work.
Even if you don't believe that a higher power has given you a
destiny on earth, every human being has the capacity to find what
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls "flow"--the total engagement
with some sort of problem solving, from climbing mountains to writing
computer programs to knitting, that causes a person to lose track of
time. Flow activities give people their happiest moments, and these
activities are intrinsically rewarding, regardless of any greater
meaning. The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that
provides flow.
That message makes Parachute not only practical but
intellectually contrarian. Protestantism, claimed Weber, divested work
of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty. Capitalism,
he continued, "has destroyed" that delight "forever".
What Color Is Your Parachute? is an extended, market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.
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Interesting to see Virginia Postrel - poster-girl of the libertarian right in the US - backtrack a little on her previous play-positive zeal. In this most recent of her columns for the New York Times, 'The Book of Jobs' (again, you'll have to buy the original - so there's a fair use extended post below), Postrel profiles a well-known US phenomenon, 'What Color Is Your Parachute?', a yearly 'Bible' for job- and career-changing. The spiritual overtones aren't inadvertent. Says the founder, Richard Bolles: 
