Career Self-Help Advice and Labor Market Changes in the U.S.

This paper examines career self-help literature in the U.S. with regard to white-collar job market changes. In the past few decades, American white-collar workers have experienced huge changes in the labor market such as frequent layoffs and unstable employment, which often means they need to engage in job-hunting at any time. In this context, career self-help advice has come to influence the unemployed and the employed alike, offering job-hunting strategies and shaping popular expectations about work and career. Given this influence, this paper looks at career self-help advice by focusing on one of the main features that characterizes the genre, the emphasis on the pursuit of one’s dream job, and what this reveals about the changes in the white-collar labor market. This is accomplished by looking at What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard Bolles, which, as the all-time bestselling career self-help literature, is representative of career self-help advice. In particular, the book has been annually updated since 1975 and is likely to register the upheavals in the job market. Accordingly, this paper examines the changes in its central career advice over the years, especially the growing emphasis on following one’s dream job, and makes sense of such changes in light of white-collar job market conditions. In doing so, the paper shows that career self-help advice reflects as well as serves the precarious employment condition of American white-collar workers today.