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Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams

by Pamela Skillings

Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Does your corporate career leave you stressed out, burned out, or just plain bummed out? You're not alone. The good news is that there's a way out-and you're holding it. Written by career expert and corporate escapee Pamela Skillings, Escape from Corporate America inspires the cubicle-bound and the corner-office-cornered to break free and create the career of their dreams-without going broke. With no-nonsense advice and unflagging humor, Skillings shows you how to

- assess your job's suck factor-from terminal boredom to boss from hell

- identify your true calling-brainstorm fantasy careers and test-drive your dream jobs

- develop your Escape Plan-set goals, figure out your timing, and evaluate your finances and health insurance options

- find jobs that don't bite-entrepreneurial corporate environments, energetic start-ups, the nonprofit sector, and flexible work options

- be your own boss-explore entrepreneurship and freelancing, assemble an advisory team, and start a business while you collect a paycheck

- follow your creative dreams-learn how to make time for your artistic passion and develop a plan to quit your day job

- overcome any obstacle-deal with fear, doubt, negative people, and other bumps along the road

Plus, Skillings shares success stories from dozens of corporate escape artists, including celebrity TV chef Andrea Beaman, Cranium CEO Richard Tait, and many others.

Full of practical strategies and fun-to-follow exercises, Escape from Corporate America will help disgruntled office workers everywhere find more meaningful, fulfilling careers.

Praise for Escape from Corporate America

With insight and humor, Skillings enumerates the stages of Corporate Disillusionment and the features of the toxic workplace--the bullying bosses, moronic co-workers, terminal boredom and rampant racism and sexism. A multitude of questionnaires, exercises and worksheets helps readers determine their dream job, assess expenses and assets, and plot an escape plan to break free of corporate life without going bankrupt....Vignettes of successful fugitives from the corporate world populate the book and an extremely useful Escape Tool Kit supplies information on where and how to find career coaches, health insurance, job listings and a wealth of other much needed resources when embarking on career change. Comprehensive, informative and witty, this book will be indispensable to those looking to start new careers with concrete plans and well-defined goals. -Publishers Weekly

Escape from Corporate America isn't just the best book ever written on creating the career of your dreams — it is the most stirring and useful book on careers that I've ever read. Pam Skillings inspired me first with her own story and then with stories who successfully escaped dreary, heartless, and sometimes nasty workplaces. This masterpiece will give you the skills to make the leap from a mind-numbing job to a great career and the courage to follow your heart. -Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor and author of The No Asshole Rule

This book might just change your life

-Barbara Sher

Pamela Skillings gives you the tools you need to take control of your career and have a more fulfilling life.

-Beth Schoenfeldt, founder of Ladies Who Launch

www.escapefromcorporate.com

Review:

"Journalist Skillings aims to rescue Americans from corporate tedium in this entertaining and informative guide to walking away from an established — albeit stultifying — job and forging a more rewarding career. With insight and humor, Skillings enumerates the stages of 'Corporate Disillusionment' and the features of the 'toxic workplace' — the bullying bosses, moronic co-workers, 'terminal boredom' and rampant racism and sexism. A multitude of questionnaires, exercises and worksheets helps readers determine their dream job, assess expenses and assets, and plot an escape plan to break free of corporate life without going bankrupt. Skillings also provides pointers to those readers who simply want to be happier in their current jobs — including negotiating for more flexible hours, telecommuting and taking sabbaticals. Vignettes of successful fugitives from the corporate world populate the book and an extremely useful 'Escape Tool Kit' supplies information on where and how to find career coaches, health insurance, job listings and a wealth of other much needed resources when embarking on career change. Comprehensive, informative and witty, this book will be indispensable to those looking to start new careers with concrete plans and well-defined goals." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Synopsis:

Career expert and corporate escapee Skillings inspires the cubicle-bound and the corner-office-cornered to break free and create the career of their dreams--without going broke.

Synopsis:

Does your corporate career leave you stressed out, burned out, or just plain bummed out? You’re not alone. The good news is that there’s a way out–and you’re holding it. Written by career expert and corporate escapee Pamela Skillings, Escape from Corporate America inspires the cubicle-bound and the corner-office-cornered to break free and create the career of their dreams–without going broke. With no-nonsense advice and unflagging humor, Skillings shows you how to

• assess your job’s “suck” factor–from terminal boredom to boss from hell

• identify your true calling–brainstorm fantasy careers and test-drive your dream jobs

• develop your Escape Plan–set goals, figure out your timing, and evaluate your finances and health insurance options

• find jobs that don’t bite–entrepreneurial corporate environments, energetic start-ups, the nonprofit sector, and flexible work options

• be your own boss–explore entrepreneurship and freelancing, assemble an advisory team, and start a business while you collect a paycheck

• follow your creative dreams–learn how to make time for your artistic passion and develop a plan to quit your day job

• overcome any obstacle–deal with fear, doubt, negative people, and other bumps along the road

Plus, Skillings shares success stories from dozens of corporate escape artists, including celebrity TV chef Andrea Beaman, Cranium CEO Richard Tait, and many others.

Full of practical strategies and fun-to-follow exercises, Escape from Corporate America will help disgruntled office workers everywhere find more meaningful, fulfilling careers.

“This book might just change your life!”

–Barbara Sher

“Pamela Skillings gives you the tools you need to take control of your career and have a more fulfilling life.”

–Beth Schoenfeldt, founder of Ladies Who Launch

www.escapefromcorporate.com

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Grady Harp, April 25, 2008 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
Taking Charge, with the Able Assistance of Pamela Skillings

The bookshelves groan with the weight of self-help books, some invaluable, and some ordinary common sense made marketable by astute ‘guides’. Though this remarkably readable new book by Pamela Skillings is subtitled ‘A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of your Dreams’, suggesting yet another of the self help series genre, what this carefully detailed, wise, and immensely user friendly book offers is a call to the reader savvy enough to buy this guide to address not only employment and how to make meaningful, plausible changes in job situations, but also how to essentially take charge of your life in every facet of living.

Skillings uses a conversational style of writing, full of wit, insight into the unspeakable issues that crowd many of our professional lives, and practical approaches to what other authors have created as ‘formulas’, and in doing so she manages to supportively take the reader by the hand and lead the way down the dark hall of indecision or stifling boredom to the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel of change. ‘You don’t have to settle’ is a term she frequently inserts into this fact-filled examination of the good and the bad side of Corporate existence. The signs and symptoms of corporate burnout are detailed in lists of levels of ‘disease’ states that provide a lot of truth as well as significant humor (monotony, control issues, workplace drama, cubiclitis, etc.). But Skillings has the wisdom to refuse to push her readers into leaving the womb of corporate security. Instead, she offers skilled advice on how to evaluate job and life goals, and follows this with detailed methods of how to approach dreams of finding the perfect job – along with a healthy list of the possible temporary setbacks and side effects of making change.

One of the many fine points of Skillings’ mentoring is her realistic approach to the challenges that accompany change. After long chapters on how to decide what kind of job would provide personal satisfaction as well as a means of viable financial support, she outlines sensible and attainable pathways to make the ‘change’ work. After deciding just what would make the reader’s life happy in the work environment (and it follows, in the home environment), Skillings suggests seeking advice from people in the field of work being considered, doing temp work in that field, volunteering in areas associated with the goal (adding to the resume as well as to the conviction that the change will be what the seeker wishes) – all before ‘quitting the day job’. In other words, Skillings advice is crowned by recommending sound research and implementation of dreams BEFORE taking the leap.

Within the context of the conversational advice are numerous examples of people who indeed escaped from corporate America, lists to complete to aid the reader in defining exactly what are the goals and the steps toward achieving them, and a constant supply of warmly friendly, gently humorous, reality based supportive asides that reassure the reader that ‘you can do this’! In her final chapter HAVE A NICE ESCAPE, before she shares myriad contacts and resources to aid the reader, Skillings warmly states ‘Only you can decide if you’re really ready to escape from Corporate America. The most important thing to remember is that you always have options. You deserve an inspiring, fulfilling career, and there’s no reason you can’t have one.’ Dreams and Visions fill the pages of this fine book and it would be difficult to find a more informed and supportive guide to attaining those than Pamela Skillings. Highly Recommended!

Grady Harp
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780345499745
Subtitle:
A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams
Author:
Skillings, Pamela
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Subject:
Career development
Subject:
Vocational Guidance
Subject:
Careers - Job Hunting
Publication Date:
May 2008
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
328
Dimensions:
8.00x5.30x.84 in. .57 lbs.

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