The Career Chronicles
An Insider's Guide to What Jobs are Really Like
Deciding on the right career can be a frustrating challenge for those entering the job market, as well as for those seeking a second career. While counseling is an option, The Career Chronicles offers useful insight that is likely to streamline the career search process.
Gregory’s methodology is to identify career categories—health care, law, social sciences, information technology—and describe select occupations within each category. This approach is valuable because it offers the career-seeker a wide range of careers to review and, potentially, pursue.
The risk of such an approach is that the book could become dry and dull. But Gregory provides more than a standard overview of each career and the requisite job statistics; he distills some 750 interviews to provide “personal observations about the good, the bad, and the ugly of each profession.”
The same questions are asked of each individual in every career, so that the reader can easily compare professions. “What do you spend most of your day doing?” and “What changes do you foresee for your profession in the future?” elicit compelling, often unexpected, answers. The result is a compendium of first-hand observations and pertinent advice from people intimately in the know.
Of course, given the vast number of career possibilities, The Career Chronicles can provide only a sampling—ten categories and twenty-three actual professions—but the goal was to present “a sufficiently broad array of careers that represented realistic opportunities for employment,” and Gregory admits that the choices were driven as much by the “quantity and quality of responses I received from interviewees.”
The Career Chronicles is a valuable overview of many meaningful careers, each of which is richly described and enhanced by the individuals who work in that profession.
Reviewed by
Barry Silverstein
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
