Have you already decided what career path you want to pursue? Perhaps you’re considering a career change? Maybe you’re entertaining the idea of starting a second career?
When it comes to career development, the struggle is real. There are so many paths to choose from, especially in the age of knowledge work. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of resources available to help you navigate this journey.
Here are Shortfrom’s picks of the best career resources, including blogs, books, and podcasts.
Making Career Choices
The matter of career has never been more relevant as they are today: We are now in the era of the “knowledge worker,” which has altered the kind of work we do.
Knowledge working means that now we can make choices about our working lives, and making good choices is necessary to having a successful career. As a knowledge worker, you can, for instance, choose where you work, and for how long you work there, unlike in the past, when workers had one career path for life. As you are likely to be the only constant factor throughout your career, you must take responsibility for your career path. Luckily, there’s no shortage of career resources available to help you navigate this journey.
To that end, we’ve scoured the web to find the best career resources, including blogs, books, and podcasts.
Best Career Blogs
Choosing what career to pursue is a big decision, so you’ll need a lot of advice along the way.
Career blogs are a great place to start your research. The best career blogs provide up-to-date information and helpful resources for professional development along your chosen path.
Here’s a list of the best career blogs to bookmark right now.
Donna Svei, the creator of Avid Careerist, is an executive resume writer. Donna works with executives to help them land high-profile jobs at reputable companies such as Airbnb, CNN, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, to name a few. On her blog, she gives readers valuable tips on how to write a stellar executive resume, how to use LinkedIn for job search, and how to ace your interview.
If you are in two minds about what career to pursue, Career Igniter is the blog for you. They profile over 500 occupations, detailing what salaries are offered, what qualifications are required, and what progression opportunities are in store. On their blog, you’ll find the latest hiring trends, networking tips, resume-writing techniques, and more.
Folks at The Muse are firm believers that company culture is the most important consideration when applying for jobs. In addition to a job board, they profile hundreds of companies, providing an authentic look at their offices, so applicants can factor it in their job search. Their blog is a treasure trove of valuable career advice, personal stories, and practical job search tips.
The Guardian Careers Blog is an excellent resource for career tips, industry trends, and personal stories. They cover a wide range of topics, from practical job search and interview advice to sweeping legal policies that could change our working lives. As expected of The Guardian, the coverage is always insightful and comprehensive in scope.
Founded in 1995, Reed is a job board that caters to the UK market. Their vision is “to connect people to a world of career opportunities online.” To that end, they feature vacancies, advertise courses, and provide helpful career advice. On the Reed blog, you’ll find expert advice on everything to do with job search and career development—from CV and cover letter templates to sample answers to common interview questions.
Career Geek is a trustworthy blog about job search and career development. Here, you’ll find expert career advice and resume tips, as well as helpful career resources such as downloadable CV and cover letter templates. If you’re a student, you should definitely check out Career Geek for practical tips on how to land an internship, pay off your student loan, and other common concerns students have.
Founded in 1995, Idealist is a non-profit organization on the mission to “help build a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.” They help social-impact organizations find talent by posting job openings, advertising internships, organizing grad-school fairs, and publishing free career resources in the social-impact industry.
Career Addict launched in 2013 as a blog section of an early project. Today, it’s one of the leading career resources on the web, serving over 14 million readers. They provide professional resume-writing and review services, downloadable CV templates, a job board, and a career test. On their blog, you’ll find over 2,500 in-depth articles and practical guides for common concerns career seekers may have.
Best Career Books
If you are serious about building your career, books are your best bet. The best career books provide helpful career reflection prompts as well as actionable tips for professional development.
Here’s a list of the best career books from the Shortform library.
How can you build a successful career in which you collect accolades and achievements throughout your working life? Peter Drucker, the creator of many influential management theories, answers this difficult question in this compact careers manual. He believes the secret to success lies in managing yourself, acting as your own CEO, and maneuvering yourself into situations where you’ll thrive.
Managing Oneself will teach you how to identify your strengths, shine a light on your inner values, and position yourself in a job where you’ll manage your own boss. Drucker rounds off his book by laying out how to have a second career that’s even better than your first. Our guide compares Drucker’s approach to other modern career advice and adds practical steps to help you apply his methods to your job.
While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.
Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.
What makes a good leader? Some say you’ll know one when you see one; others confuse being a leader with simply having a title. In The 5 Levels of Leadership, John C. Maxwell gives a shape and form to something seemingly indefinable and provides a roadmap to help you reach your full leadership potential.
Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that harmonizes with their values and makes them happy. But many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work with no way out. Some hope that if only they can find their “true passion,” everything will magically fall into place. Both attitudes—the defeated one and the magical passion one—are false. What we need is a clear-cut process for designing our lives, a learnable approach to building a fulfilling career.
In Designing Your Life, Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans provide this very approach by sharing the content of their popular courses and workshops on life design. Using concrete principles and examples, they teach readers how to design a meaningful life in which they can truly thrive.
In our society, we admire success-oriented people—or go-getters. But in The Go-Giver, authors Bob Burg and John David Mann turn that idea on its head. They argue that you should make giving rather than getting your first priority in business and in life—and success will follow. In the form of a business parable in which a mentor puts a frustrated go-getter on the path to success and fulfillment, the authors explain why and how you can change from being a go-getter to a go-giver by practicing the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success.
In his book The First 90 Days, Michael Watson provides you with key principles for setting yourself up for success in the first 90 days of your new role as well as practical exercises for implementing those principles throughout the transition process.
The goal for your first 90 days is to avoid the traps that can lead to vicious cycles down the road (e. g. choices that undermine your credibility or erect structural or cultural barriers to your transition) while focusing on positive principles that can create virtuous cycles to support your success.
Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal, and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, take risks and be ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.
In this follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face, blogger, motivational speaker, and author Rachel Hollis writes that she’s fed up with seeing women ignore their own dreams because of self-doubt, guilt, and society’s expectation that women put others first. Hollis offers the lessons she learned in growing from humble beginnings to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar media company to help her readers shed the weight of expectation and achieve their dreams.
Best Career Podcasts
The beauty of podcasts is that you can entertain yourself on the go or while you’re doing activities that don’t require much brainpower. And you can get things done while learning something useful.
Here’s our selection of the best career podcasts to listen to in 2022.
Career Talk – Learn – Grow – Thrive
Career Talk with Stephanie Dennis is a lighthearted podcast that offers holistic career advice. Stephanie doesn’t shy away from diving into “dangerous” topics and using adult language. She helps readers to put their careers into perspective, discusses side-gigs, and gives practical tips for finding and landing the right job.
Are you considering a career transition? Then, Switch, Pivot, or Quit with Ahyiana Angel might just be right up your alley. Having successfully switched from a sports entertainment publicist to a published author, Ahyiana embarked on the journey of helping people navigate a career transition on their own terms. This is a candid podcast featuring stories of real women translated into thought-provoking insights and practical advice.
As the name suggests, Being Boss with Emily Thompson is a show about becoming your own boss. For over a decade, Emily has been helping people make money doing what they’re passionate about. On Being Boss, she empowers listeners to take control of their working lives by discussing things like entrepreneur mindset, work-life balance, e-commerce ideas, and more.
The Career Changers is an online community on a mission to empower people on their journey to career self-realization. If you need a boost of clarity and perspective to help you make the career jump, The Career Changers may be just the inspiration you need. Join in for inspirational stories of career change and expert advice from the best career and life coaches in the world.
Side Hustle School is hosted by Chris Guillebeau, the New York Times bestselling author of The $100 Startup, The Happiness of Pursuit, and other books. This is a daily show for both practicing and aspiring side-hustlers. Every episode presents a real side-hustle story, detailing what went wrong, how they overcame the obstacles, and what the final outcome was.
The title of this podcast says it all: Why keep slaving away at your day job if you can be paid doing what you love? That’s exactly what Cathy Heller, the host of this show (who is also a bestselling author and a business and spiritual coach) is here to do. She’ll help you overcome the fears, see the possibilities, and build a life where you can be paid for being authentically you.
In Repurpose Your Career, host Marc Miller sits down with career experts as well as regular people like you to discuss how to repurpose your career for the 21st century. The show is targeted at people who are in the second half of their lives and who feel like their careers are no longer serving them.
Final Words
Decisions concerning careers—whether it’s choosing what career path to pursue, embarking on a career change, or quitting your job and starting a passion project—are some of the most life-changing decisions you’ll make. We hope these career resources will help you make the right decision and give you a little nudge to move from dreaming into action.
Did we miss your favorite career blog, book, or podcast? Let us know in the comments!
