P-p-p-pick up a Penguin Careers Guide

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Penguin Careers Guide’s extensive career coverage, from A-Z of professions, is crudely done, with specific jobs given lengthy discourse and information, whilst others such as Publishing getting a paltry few pages. They also manage to homogenise entire industries, whilst going into detailed variations of certain careers even though they are no more complex than the ones they simplified earlier.

Rather than being purely an overly general, touch-the-surface encyclopaedia of job choices (perhaps a useful tool for those first branching out to thinking of careers) it instead seems jarringly geared around the corporate world.

Naively I just hoped that a book company publishing a book about careers would feel a duty to discuss creative enterprises in more depth

Perhaps the book was commissioned by specific corporations, and those implicit were clearly sincere in their remarks on the blurb. I was hoping a books company would have more autonomy than that.

From the outset, the book does seek to appear to shoehorn people into specific regimented career paths, and considering the plethora of opportunity out there, it is not the best message to its target audience. Especially to university students.

But really I am being harsh to Penguin, which is actually a very good company, mostly. Instead, the real lesson is that a book won’t get you a career. By all means follow the box-ticking approach a book like Penguin will imply is available, but even to get the jobs they advocate, some of which are actually prestigious and interesting in their own way, it will still require plenty of hard graft and other intangibles that exist outside of the book .

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. It would probably help if many of us became less worried that our university life would lead to a limbo of faceless placements and graduate schemes. That world is great at times, but not for everyone, and there is much more outside of that lens or scope, and there is plenty of time to achieve it, regardless of what the book says.

Image Credits: Header (Flickr/Martha de Jong-Lantink), Image 1 (penguin.co.uk).