What's That Job and How the Hell Do I Get It?

I have mixed feelings about this book, hence the full-on review. If I could, I would give it 2.5 stars. The concept is such a good idea, and there are people who will benefit from this book, but here's what I wish I had known:

1. The tone of this book is so casual and flip, it's off-putting. People older than 25 will find it distracting, and new college graduates will find it eye-rollingly uncool.

2. The jobs profiled? Not as innovative as I would have hoped. Pharmaceutical sales rep? Psychologist? Actor? Really? The coolest job I have every heard of remains “person who coordinated the logistics of delivering US Olympic athletes' equipment (for all teams!) to Bejing.” All the jobs in Rosen's book were ones I knew existed, and the definition of cool here seems to be “may not be a desk job.”

3. The research for each position is...thin. While he does quote people in the field about what they like and don't like about their jobs, it's often one person per profile, sometimes two. Also, it goes without saying that many of the links featured in the book are out of date, so you will be left Googling industry terms to find new sources, which is what you might have done anyway.

All this aside, he does give a good overview of each position, including a general idea of how people working in each field spend their time and what a typical day is like, so it's a low-risk way to find out if a particular career is worth considering further. If I ran a career counseling office on a college campus, I would offer this for students to skim through - which is too bad, because I think lots of kinds of people look for jobs and the idea deserved more.