career development – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Software Engineer’s Guidebook: Navigating Senior, Tech Lead & Staff Engineer Positions at Tech Companies & Startups

By Scott J. Pearson | June 1, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Writing software promises a career full of intellectual challenges, never-ending learning, and collaborative projects. Yet sometimes, the career path can seem arduous and hidden, especially for those not on the management track. How can engineers lead when they’re not managing a team? In this book, Gergely Orosz shows how engineers can establish a career, progress to senior level and tech lead, and then move onto principal or staff engineering roles. None of these roles involves…

Writing Effective Promotion Applications

By Scott J. Pearson | March 27, 2024March 27, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Academic life is tough because one’s professional impact is hard to put into numbers that determine success. Results extend beyond the bottom line into many intangible factors. A lot of data are involved. And there are nit-picky relationships with colleagues that will last beyond the promotion decision. Research, teaching, and service can combine into an uncomfortable triad that doesn’t always yield fruit. In this book, Anne-Wil Harzing, a professor at Middlesex University London, offers career…

Family Psychology Research-Education

The Self-Driven Child: The Science & Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

By Scott J. Pearson | July 8, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Like many, I had parents who tried to engineer their lives for “success,” but paid no attention to my passions, interests, and approach to life. Firsthand, I’ve seen that parenting style’s folly and futility and want to take a different angle with my daughter and with other children I have influence over. Enter The Self-Driven Child. This book helped concretize abstract beliefs into a coherent philosophy. It distills basic child psychology into a workable format…

Indie Leadership Mentoring

Equip Your Inner Coach: Personal, Career & Leadership Development in an Uncertain Age

By Scott J. Pearson | February 11, 2023September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

How can someone advance their career and leadership skills without having access to good, personalized mentoring? Many – particularly women and minorities – in the workforce lack such access, yet their ambition to contribute to the world does not lack. What are they to do? One thing they can do is check out Janet Bickel’s book. In it, she teaches readers to rely on their “inner coach” and like-minded peers in figuring out how to…

Management-Business Mentoring

Mid-Career Crisis: Why Some Sail Through While Others Don’t

By Scott J. Pearson | November 12, 2022November 12, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Early career development gets the bulk of social attention, and rightly so because starting a career takes work. Failure to do so can lead to vast social and economic consequences. But the middle of a career also deserves some attention, as Basu points out in this book. It has its own host of crises. Successful resolution of these can lead to even greater career fulfillment in later days; failure to resolve these, however, can lead…

Management-Business Mentoring

The Mentor’s Toolkit for Career Conversations

By Scott J. Pearson | October 10, 2022October 10, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Many students and people in their early careers need to learn how to think and act about careers. To them, learning this understanding can be an “elephant in the room” holding them back from achieving their goals – and personal happiness. Mentoring is one way to help these people get their lives on track. This tool is especially used in educational settings. However, mentoring is harder than it first appears. To help mentee-mentor relationships get…

Mentoring

Super Mentors: The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Asking Extraordinary People for Help

By Scott J. Pearson | September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

As adults move from school into the workplace, learning from teachers in formal settings often shifts to learning from mentors in more informal settings. However, in this new environment, being a successful mentee is often more important than having a successful mentor. Being a successful mentee means growing in self-awareness and persistent towards finding out the right answers to your specific dilemmas. Learning to ask the right questions to the right people in the right…

Management-Business

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Organizations Need & Employees Want

By Scott J. Pearson | August 29, 2022August 29, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Leading and developing a dynamic team is tough in any business field. Many people move from job to job and never gain critical depth. The organizational ladder used to reflect the “true path” towards career growth, but organizations are much flatter than they used to be. This means that career development needs to be rethought for new situations. In this book, Kaye and Winkle Giulioni try to help managers think about how to have these…

Fiction-Stories Management-Business Mentoring

Starting Strong: A Mentoring Fable

By Scott J. Pearson | June 9, 2022July 24, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

A key way to develop careers is forming a mentoring relationship. To facilitate this, a mentor has to gain specific skills, and a mentee, likewise, has to possess certain skills. Although this relationship can make a healthy career, not a lot of conversation about this topic exists, even in education circles. In this work, Zachary and Fischler try to examine traits that make mentoring relationships work. They do so through a fable (or allegory) that…

Management-Business

The #PACE Process for Early Career Success

By Scott J. Pearson | April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

An individual’s early career often sets the trajectory for future success, for better or for worse. Yet during this time, the path to success is almost universally less clear, and obstacles abound. Young professionals need mentoring and solid advice to advance, but hard-to-access options to get aid can conflict with each other. Now, a post-pandemic climate leaves remote and hybrid work environments where interpersonal interactions are less frequent. In this book, Zides tries to coach…