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We think you will find this book useful for a long time. It’s for people looking for their first career job or looking to improve on the one they’ve got. Find a Better Job is filled with helpful and solid information – not just trendy slogans. Each chapter takes you one step forward on your career path.

This book comes from the work Dolan Management does with career training. We specialize in communication. But over the years, we have answered many larger questions about using communication to get ahead. We identified some of the most reliable and up to date sources we could find to compile this book. Each chapter comes from a different expert source. The information, of course, is used with the expressed written permission of the authors. We put them together in a way we think you will find most useful to you.

The first six chapters take you step-by-step through the job-finding process. After reading them you can be confident and prepared to take the action you want. The last three chapters are more thoughtful, giving you a sense of employment trends and issues today and over the next few years.

We begin with information for Matching Yourself to the World of Work. This chapter identifies the skills you need to hold any of nearly 250 jobs, covering the kind of career you are interested in. The chapter focuses on a chart that compares the jobs to the skills. The chapter is written by economist Erik A. Savisaar based on information supplied by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

First, get a sense of your own skills, including basic ones such as math and communication as well as more advanced skills, such as leadership ability. Next, find the job you are most comfortable with. Maybe you already possess all the education and experience you need for the job. If not, this chapter shows you want you need to acquire in order to get that job.

The information-rich chart is large, so for convenience, we placed it at the end of the book. The legend for reading the table comes at the end of the chapter. It’s easy to figure it out.

Once you decide Changing Your Job is the course for you, you will want to do it in an efficient and practical manner. The second chapter helps you size up your present job before doing anything. It helps you decide where you are now and where you are going in the future. It provides you with the information you need to make your job change like a professional, which might even be finding the right part of your current company. Find out about keeping your benefits. Information in this chapter comes from the MetLife Consumer Education Center.

Once you are set on your course, you will enter the world of Using Help Wanted Services. Help wanted ads and employment services are a world of their own. Most people only enter this world for a brief part of their working lives. This chapter, prepared by Federal Trade Commission, helps you with that temporary stay by giving you a good outline of the situation and pointing you to useful sources of information to pursue for your particular search goals. The suggestions here result from several employment service problems that surfaced in the 1990s. By reading this chapter you can avoid these problems.

Next you will want to apply the basic tools of the job search: Making the Best Résumés, Applications, and Cover Letters. This chapter is full of solid, practical information with examples. Stuffed with tips and quotes from experts, this chapter by employment specialist Olivia Crosby is all you’ll need to know about this so important topic. You’ll also get some easy to find references for more detailed information.

An increasingly popular method for finding a better job these days is Networking through Job Fairs. This brief chapter compiled by the US Bureau of Labor gives you a quick list of what you should know in order to make the best use of these events. It also contains some follow through tips.

Success means that at sometime you will be Interviewing for the Job, a necessary and valuable aspect of boosting any career. This no-nonsense chapter by Olivia Crosby tells you what to expect before, how to conduct yourself during, and what to do after the interview.

Most of this book is solid, hard core, use-it-now information. However, you may be interested in reading Futurework, a summary of trends and changes in the work world. The report comes from a US Department of Labor survey released for the new century.

Now you are set -- ready to identify and acquire the right job for you. The final two chapters survey what is out there. Because e-book readers are technically aware, the next chapter by economist Carolyn M. Veneri focuses on Opportunities in Information Technology. If you are interested, you can read about current and future jobs for computer engineers, systems analysts, programmers, database administrators, computer support specialists, and other computer scientists. If you are not interested in this line of work, you can skip to Tomorrow’s Jobs, which helps you make realistic decisions about what you want to do.

Happy Hunting.

Michael Dolan, editor