16 Helpful Books About Finding Your Career Path

Your Personal Career Coach is a unique career development guide because it delivers practical advice through 125 real-life career stories shared by executives, entrepreneurs, career coaches, recruiters, and professionals. Within the pages of Your Personal Career Coach are stories to help you write a resume that gets interviews, interview effectively, ask for a raise, know when and how to quit your job, understand your boss, work effectively with a team, and many more that will enhance your professional skills, boost your job performance and help you succeed. Your Personal Career Coach is filled with valuable insights, humorous confessions, and inspiring advice from authors with diverse experiences and perspectives that will help you advance your own career.

In this brilliant book Stahl puts forward an 11 step roadmap to help the reader get clarity on what work lights them up, and devise an action plan to create a career they truly love. It helped me redevise my career path at 32, and I’ve never looked back since.

Choosing a career path is a difficult thing to do, especially when you’re just completed college. This is book is the best compass when it comes to making that jump from studying to working. But not only that. It’s also a must-have when you want to change your career at any point during your professional life. I read this book when I decided to shift from being an employee to being an entrepreneur. Less than five pages in, I finally understood why the book has been a fave for career experts for all of three decades now. While the book has certain religious overtones, it maintains a steady, easy-to-read and has tones of gems to top it up. The book offers a lot of information on how to build a resume, how to choose your occupation, and what each profession means for your future life. The most recent edition of the book also comes with a chapter on how to search for online jobs, which is crucial in today’s world.

Lifework: How to Find Work You Love is a fantastic step-to-step guidebook that helps readers find the right career path. It has a unique writing style that divides it partly into a book and partly a journal. This writing style incorporated by the author, Wright, makes the book a hands-on and action-oriented book that helps readers navigate their career path and discover work that fulfills them. Readers gain access to knowledge that helps them design and act with clear intentions to find their most significant life expression.

Recalculating is a book written by a leading workplace expert, Lindsey Pollak, who uses inspirational, forward-looking, and a very practical playbook to enlighten readers on the right decisions to make when finding their careers. It’s a book designed for recent graduates from college and university, people changing careers, and professionals looking to transition in the ever-changing global job market. The author highlights the effects of uncertain events that change the working environment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. She emphasizes how the old way and career rules of job hunting are no longer applicable as we have seen what change can do to the working landscape. This book is a masterpiece, insightful, and is packed with realistic tips especially for fresh grads.

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show readers how to create a life they love. The authors explain how to apply design thinking principles to designing one’s career and thus one’s life. Evans is an adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, a management consultant, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts, a California-based video game company.

As the title of Robin Sharma’s book suggests, your finest work occurs before the rest of the world awakens. The book The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life claims that rising up one hour earlier (yes, really) may help you reduce stress, boost attention and creativity, and achieve success. Sharma is a motivational speaker and the author of The Leader Who Had No Title.

How to turn seemingly minor daily choices into massive success and happiness is the focus of The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines Into Massive Success and Happiness. One of the primary factors determining success today, according to coauthor Jeff Olson, is the ripple effect. Olson founded The People’s Network and is a motivational speaker. He has written The Go-Giver with Bob Burg, The Latte Factor with David Bach, The Red Circle with Brandon Webb, and Flash Foresight with Daniel Burrus, among other books.

The pathfinder is a brilliant book for students, as well as people who wish to switch careers. It is not a collection of bland advice unlike some others in the genre, but offers exercises and questionnaires for the reader to solve and figure out their true calling. It also suggests career options based on personality types. The author has outlined a detailed plan that urges you to make lists, introspect, assess choices and work rather than cribbing about not being able to find what makes you happy. Other authors offer information, but Nicholas has offered an actionable plan. The book is way beyond regular preaching and is the perfect tool that helps to find a career.

RATTLED is an inspirational resource for people whose career path has been pulled out from under them and now find life’s disruptions and how to start over in a new career that is much better suited to your talents and personality.

There are almost 400 careers to choose from, with 134 major job listings and hundreds more related jobs. Content that is easy to navigate and a spread layout that aids readers in finding the right job for them. The design is bright, colorful, and icon-driven, making the job-search experience less scary and more enjoyable.

In her book Atlas of the Heart, Sally Kohn Brown discusses what it means to be human. She explains how we might access a world of new options and second chances by using language and tools. The book is intended to serve as a universal atlas.

Ignite Your Career is jam-packed with practical information and straightforward instructions. This is a book that every university student and young professional should have to help them guide their career path. The beauty of this book is that, it might seem like common knowledge, but it’s exactly what you need to hear during the job search. This book is organized in such a manner that it will walk you through the steps with ease. This book will teach you how to set career goals that are aligned with your skills, providing you with a clear path forward.

The motivating book will make you a motivated person. An easy to read, written in plain English, the book can be read at one sitting. It gives the feeling as if it was written for you and about you. It will help you to develop a positive attitude and to become motivated for achieving your goals.

ROAR offers an empowering path of reimagining and embracing your present and your tomorrow through a dynamic process called ROAR: Reimagine yourself. Own who you are. Act on what’s next. Reassess your relationships. Michael Clinton will show you how to ROAR into your future through his own example, and through more than 40 true stories of people who didn’t let their age or setbacks stop them from pursing their goals and living a passionate, fulfilling life.

This narrative set in ancient time Spain and the Sahara Desert is an excellent book to read for introspection if you want to find a career path. It follows the life of a shepherd boy, Santiago, as he moves with his goats, makes friends, and changes the course of his life in search of the Alchemist. It is a tale of resilience and unwavering human vision. Santiago, never wanting to settle, lets life take its course. This decision sees him move from one place to another until he finds the Alchemist, thus his life purpose.