Networking, negotiating, communicating, leading, career planning—all skills critical to your career success. But did anyone ever teach you these skills?
The Career Toolkit will help you master these vital skills and yield outsized returns for your career and your income. Every chapter is packed with dozens of actionable principles, exercises, and practices that will accelerate your success. It’s a multivitamin for your career!
CAREER
Chapter 1. Career Plan
Everyone has a dream job, but how do you get there? Starting with inputs and key questions learn how to define your goals and chart a path to get you where you want to go. The process can help you at any stage of your career.
Chapter 2. Working Effectively
How do you get the most out of your job? Learn how you can improve your effectiveness in any role in order to deliver better results, and advance more quickly in your career.
Chapter 3. Interviewing
Successful teams require strong team members, but most companies don’t provide hiring training. You’ve likely learned how to interview but have you learned how to hire? Learn how to hire others—and become a better candidate yourself.
LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT
Chapter 4. Leadership
Leading doesn’t start when you become a manager, but rather the day you start your career. Learn the components of leadership and how you can begin to lead today. Even if you never want a leadership role, these skills will help you be a more effective team member.
Chapter 5. Management: People
Ask any manager and they’ll tell you the hardest part of the job is the people. From defining what a manager actually does, to team development, to motivation these fundamental techniques will help you become more effective whether you’re an individual contributor or in the executive suite.
Chapter 6. Management: Process
This chapter looks at how a modern team executes including team communication, reflection and learning, effective meetings, and more. The tools here will apply across industries and functions, allowing both you and your teammates to operate more effectively.
INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS
Chapter 7. Communication
We each view the world through our own lenses, shaped by our individual knowledge and experience. Learning to identify these lenses will help you effectively convey your ideas to others.
Chapter 8. Networking
Everyone says networking is critical but when it comes down to it, most people don’t know what to actually do. Learn specific techniques and tools to build relationships and grow your network.
Chapter 9. Negotiation
Imagine if you negotiated your next job offer and got just $1,000 more. Over the next thirty years in that job you just earned $30,000. Of course you’ll have many more job offers and raises to negotiate in the future so that $30,000 is just the beginning. Learning to negotiate can earn you tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars more over your career.
Chapter 10. Ethics
Your impact on the world comes not just from you as an individual, but from what you do in and through your company. You will face ethical questions in your career and as with other challenges if you’re not prepared, you run the risk of making the wrong decision.
In just a few hours this book will accelerate your career.
Semi Finalist
Assessment:
Idea: Herschberg's The Career Toolkit offers readers experienced insight into considering, preparing for, and navigating their professional endeavors, with a focus on financial impact.
Prose: The Career Toolkit strikes a smart balance between accessibility and academia. Readers will have no trouble perusing its pages and absorbing the text's most-salient points.
Originality: Herschberg's guide to career pathing acts on an almost philosophical level, demanding introspection of the reader while providing more concrete guides and data to create a holistic experience.
Character/Execution: A well thought-out approach and clearly defined structure, paired to an omni-applicable strategy and Herschberg's absorbable writing, makes The Career Toolkit an insightful digest for readers of all careers.
Date Submitted: January 20, 2021
This is not a book that you read once and put aside. Page after page, there are useful tips. You can open any random page at any time and learn a new skill that you can put into practice immediately.
A must read handbook for the twenty-first century professional. Every chapter is packed with pragmatic tools and approaches to accelerate your career.
Finding success in your career is about more than just knowing the right hard skills — it's about being able to negotiate, communicate and network effectively. Join us as we speak with MIT instructor and author Mark Herschberg about developing these crucial skills (from goal-setting to evaluating opportunities in your existing job) and building a strong career.
