A Woman’s Framework for a Successful Career and Life

Successfully Navigating a Profession is a comprehensive resource for young women trying to figure out how to build a successful career in today's world. Unfortunately, young women navigating the current workforce are faced with career metaphors that can make achieving a successful career tantamount to sending a text message from a rotary phone. While building a satisfying career in today's economy isn't quite as easy as laying on your couch and texting in your American Idol votes, it doesn't have to seem impossible either. This book explains how. Its 2010 women routinely serve on the President's cabinet (President Obama's has five), lead large corporations such as Pepsi and Xerox, and comprise 60 percent of college graduates. The ingredients to the 'secret sauce' of a woman's career aren't so secret anymore. However, few books provide those ingredients in a straightforward, organized way. In this timely work, the authors lay out, one by one, the building blocks for a successful, lifelong career focusing on skills (such as leadership and communication), mentoring, work-life fit, and personal branding. Is this book a cookbook for success of a modern women's career? Probably not; even the most accomplished women don't claim to have followed a formulaic path to success. What Hamerstone and Musser Hough do is help a young woman think about what her satisfying career might really look like and provide a unifying framework for how to get there. Appropriate for a young woman just entering the workforce up through a woman in mid-career (who doesn't have time to read a dozen different books on various narrow career topics), Successfully Navigating a Profession lays out the key elements of a successful career in a concise and logical manner. Those elements include core skills - Leadership, Communication, Negotiation as well as Networking, Mentoring, Career Path Navigation, Work-Life Fit, and Personal Brand. Each topic includes a summary of key research and leading thought on these issues and is infused with examples and commentary from successful women gathered through interviews the authors conducted with women of all ages in corporate, government, and non-for-profit organizations. Most importantly, each chapter answers the 'So What Does this Mean for Me?' question by offering realistic, concrete suggestions for how women can Successfully Navigate a Profession. The authors offer a unique blend of practical and academic experiences that provides the reader with a framework to successfully navigate her career in today's economy.