Land the Tech Job You Love (Pragmatic Life)
Land the Tech Job You Love (Pragmatic Life)
As a techie, you’re a special breed, with special challenges facing you in the job search. Your competition is smart, tech-savvy, and highly resourceful. Expectations among employers are higher. Your competition will run you over if you’re not up to the challenge. Land the Tech Job You Love gives you the background, the skills, and the hard-won wisdom to bypass the mistakes of those who don’t prepare.
You might not think you need this book. Conventional Wisdom has it that finding a job is simple: send some resumes, go on some interviews, and take the offer that sounds best. But that’s only the start. You’ve got the background and skills to work the Web and other resources that the general job seeker doesn’t. This book shows you how to take advantage of those skills or be left behind by competing techies who do.
It all starts with an examination of you, your strengths, and where you want your career to take you. Without a roadmap, you’ll wind up in any old job. Life’s too short to spend in a job that you don’t love. From there, you’ll see how to find the job you want that fits you and the employer, using your technical and web savvy to find the hidden jobs that never make it into the classifieds or Monster.
“Marketing” is not a dirty word, and you’ll learn how to present yourself, your skills, and your background in the way that shows the hiring company that you’re the right person for the job. Create a resume that tosses out conventional wisdom, write cover letters that sell your background, and assemble a portfolio of work that will wow the interviewer.
Social networking has been the darling of the Web in the past few years, but it’s no substitute for the sort of personal interaction that makes relationships that help in future careers. As one manager said, “One recommendation is worth a million resumes.” This book shows you how to make and maintain the connections that will drive your future career moves.
Land the Tech Job You Love pulls no punches and lays out the details for what gets you an interview, and gets you hired in a job in the technical world that makes you happy.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Reading the Book You Love
Andy Lester comes at this topic from a unique perspective - that of a manager, and that of a programmer. He’s in a unique perspective to discuss both what the programmer is looking for in a position, and what a manager is looking for in an employee.
This book moves step-by-step, beginning with figuring out what you want. From there, you move on to resumes, your online presence, portfolios, job listings, interviews, and keeping on top of your game.
Andy does a great job of covering it all step by step, so that younger coders who may be newer to the process catch all the right information, but in a cheerful and friendly tone that doesn’t patronize more experienced professionals for whom some of the content might be a healthy review.
Buy this book. Andy Lester provides useful and practical information, while inspiring confidence and reassuring you that you are quite in control when it comes to the job hunt. Enjoy!
5 Stars A Useful Resource
I’m very happy that I purchased this book. It gives a sensible, clear rundown of the steps to take to put yourself in the best position possible to get the job that you want.
The book touches on finding a job that you actually WANT, preparing your resume and cover letter, researching a company, and the interview process–you know, the stuff that seems incredibly simple until you actually sit down to do it. The advice given is practical and could apply to most fields, although the author does address specific concerns for those applying for tech jobs. I enjoyed the clarity of the author’s writing.
My husband’s a programmer–I purchased the book with him in mind–and thus far the book has been very helpful in his ongoing job search.
Highly recommended.
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