Financial Times journalist reviews book ' If not now when? how to take charge of your career.'

Posted on Sunday, 2nd January 2011

'If not now when? how to take charge of your career' by Jane Barrett and Camilla Arnold, published by A & C Black (June 2010).

So often, self-help books are full of inspirational guidance from self-made successes who “just happened” to have a spare house to sell to fund their passion, or they’re chock full of inappropriate examples aimed at twenty-something New York-dwelling, well-connected party-planners.

The book is aimed at those wanting to proactively manage their own career development or considering a change in career. How it stands out from the crowd is its refusal to focus on just one aspect of the perfect career. It runs the whole gamut of essential preparations from “understanding yourself” to the more practical considerations of writing CVs and learning interview techniques.

Constructed in four broad parts, the book looks by turns at what’s holding you back, understanding yourself, brainstorming and moving forward and job search strategy and within these sections delves into the nuts and bolts of things like defining passions, obtaining financial support, returning to work and how to navigate interviews.

What’s really great about If Not Now, When? is that it’s not aimed at the already-ambitious or over-entitled. The book is for anyone who’s found themselves at a career crossroads, whether through choice or whether through sheer bad luck. It’s peppered with realistic case studies of people who have encountered family hardship and retrained to deal with it, of people who have endured 18 months’ redundancy and come out the other side. And it’s not age-specific either; there’s a whole section on retirees and third-age workers.

Each chapter concludes with an in-depth set of exercises designed to enable the reader to really take control. The end of the “Understanding yourself” chapter entreats you to, for example, list the top five skills you were born with or tick the values you hold most dear and the sorts of environments you would like to work in or have liked working in.

In the brainstorming section, you’re asked to begin to keep a record of everyone you come across during your networking phase, so you can follow up old leads. And there’s the old friend “questions you might be asked in the interview scenario”.

Of course, some of this information is tried-and-tested and obvious, some of it isn’t, but if you follow the exercises as you read, by the time you reach the section on compiling your own CV you realise you’ve already practically done it.

Special mention must go to the usability of the index. So many books contain useful information hidden deep in the middle of chapters with no way of accessing it. Barrett and Arnold’s index is incredibly user-friendly (“word ‘I’” under CVs and “money as an obstacle”) and really reflect a jobseeker’s main concerns rather than the writers’ (which, happily in this book seem to be in sync anyway).

In their summary the authors say, “this is the book we both wished we had when we started trying to carve out a more satisfying career”. And it shows. It’s not written by a distant guru dispensing pearls of wisdom, it’s written by people who have been at both ends of the career path and know how to tell the story.

Hazel Davis writes on careers and education for a number of publications including the Guardian, Financial Times and Independent.