The Book of Jobs

Essay on the continuing popularity of What Color Is Your Parachute?

The New York Times Book Review , January 14, 2005

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 Heckscher, 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 resumes 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 resume 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. Under the old work ethic, liking your work wasn't expected. Under the new one that Bolles promotes, enjoyment is essential. In the 1972 edition, Bolles called enjoyment ''divine radar'' guiding you toward the job you should be doing. The 2005 edition includes a chapter to help readers identify the skills they most enjoy using and match them to the environments in which they might find the greatest satisfaction. Its title, ''When You Lose All Track of Time,'' suggests a purely secular reading of the book's search for meaningful work.

The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that makes you happy. This idea makes the book not only practical, but intellectually contrarian. Weber claimed that Protestantism divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty, while capitalism 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.