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

I didn't think the world needed yet another book on being an entrepreneur, but this book is quite original. Before you invest any time at all, Skillings has you take a smart quiz "Are you a corporate casualty?" which will be a big eye opener for many, mostly because this talented writer has a gift. It feels like she's talking to you and to you only. It was actually quite eerie to hear someone talking to me, describing all the feelings I had been harboring inside, sharing them with no one, about my corporate job. Skillings knew exactly what was going on with me (after all, they'd been going on with her) but she even listed the feelings in the order I was having them. It was at that moment this book had me. It is also a very balanced view .. and Skillings realizes that not everyone is a candidate for corporate dropout. In fact, she spends some time talking about corporate jobs that don't suck. And - things you can do (more little tests and quizes) to validate your decision; things you can do to improve your situation. She realizes escaping corporate America to follow your dream is always going to involve a leap of faith, but she truly wants you to do it with your eyes wide open. I especially appreciated the level of research that went into this book, which gives iy credibility and objectivity. Skillings found the corporate dropout path the right one for her, but she doesn't assume it's the right one for you, and she pays homage to those corporations that do everything they can to make it work. But at the end of the day, there are certain people that just won't ever be happy in the corporate machine, and to those people, she offers a practical guide. If you are thinking of doing something else besides the corporate thing, buy this book and read it.

From the number of people I have heard talking about getting out of the corporate rat race, I would guess nearly everyone has that desire at some point or another. However, very few people actually do it. To understand this, it helps to know a beautiful word that isn't used often enough: velleity. It dates from the early 17th Century and comes from the Latin word velle, which means wish or will. It represents something you feel a desire for, but not strong enough to overcome inertia and do anything about it. Sometimes, not acting is a very good thing. You shouldn't abandon your family because of a single fit of anger or frustration. Nor should you quit your job and dip yourself into the molten hot problems of not being able to pay your bills, not being able to finance your dreams, or have enough to even eat on a regular basis. Whenever I am in a vast room with acres of cubicles I can barely breathe and want to flee. Despite their regular paychecks, solid benefits, and structured work life, I know for certain that life is not for me. For some people, the dread of spending any more of their precious time and life energy in one more meaningless meeting, or working one more day in a beige half-cube sitting in identical chairs, working at identical computers, regulated by identical policies as if you really were just another cog in a vast machine becomes too much to take. When you get to that level of dread, for your own mental health, you should investigate your alternatives. Not that you should rashly act on the first idea or two that pop into your head. Instead, you should read this book and look at the wonderful range or opportunities Pamela Skillings has laid out for you. Best of all, she gives you toolkits for each idea that help you work out whether that path is right for you. The great thing Skillings does is to show you a number of alternatives to the horror show your present job has become. You don't have to leap from a reasonably secure and comfortable mid-level management job to the utter uncertainty of starting your own business from scratch. There are a large number of alternatives you can and should investigate. She divides the books twelve chapters into three parts. Part 1 is called "Plan Your Escape" and has chapters on why today's market is not what it was a generation or two back, the burnout and boredom that can accompany modern corporate work, the myth of the one true calling, the fantasies we have about work that we pretend can become a reality (they can't), and how to try out your dream job without jumping off a cliff. She also talks about the practicalities of career change and how to mitigate the very real downsides and landmines you can set off with a careless misstep. Part 2 is "Exploring Escape Routes" and guides you through seven gradations of alternative changes. The first is how to "Corporate Jobs That Don't Suck". And really, that is a personal thing. What you may think is a great job may wel

I'm fortunate... I love my job. That doesn't mean there aren't some days where I'd gladly trade it in for a new model, but that's true for anything you do. However, I'm constantly amazed by how many people truly *hate* what they do, and only continue working because they can't afford not to. Pamela Skillings looks at people in that predicament and offers them a way out in her book Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams. It's a well-written book that should give you all the help you need to start making choices and decisions to change your current situation. Contents: Quiz: Are You A Corporate Casualty? Part 1: Plan Your Escape 1. This Is Not Your Father's Job Market 2. The Trouble with the Rat Race 3. True Callings and Wrong Numbers 4. Let's Get Practical Part 2: Exploring Escape Routes 5. Corporate Jobs That Don't Suck 6. Take A Break 7. Swim in a Smaller Pond 8. Go Solo 9. Build a Business 10. Follow Your Creative Dreams 11. Make A Difference Part 3: Going Over the Wall 12. Going Over the Wall Have a Nice Escape The Escape Tool Kit Acknowledgments Meet the Corporate Escape Artists The thing I like most about this book is that it doesn't try to fit everyone into a "one size fits all" mold. In the job world, "one size fits almost nobody". Skillings lays out the reasons why you may not be satisfied with your corporate existence. Sometimes it's due to burnout, sometimes to disillusionment, or even due to reorganizations that have relegated you to working for the boss from hell. Whatever the case, getting to the core of your dissatisfaction is key to figuring out how to correct it. Once that's established, she then explores the potential options that you might want to explore. For some, corporate life is fine, but you need a new pond. There's nothing wrong with a cubicle if that fits your style and comfort zone. Perhaps for others, it's just a sabbatical that's needed to recharge the batteries a bit. Maybe a start-up where you're playing a variety of roles? Become your own boss as a contractor/consultant? All those possibilities are put out there for you to consider, along with hints as to why or why not each one may be right for you. The final part of the book wraps everything up with a realistic expectation of what you'll feel when you've made the decision to pull the trigger... fear. Often that fear keeps people from taking that final step. With Skillings's help, you can see that for what it is and act accordingly. Another thing that makes this an enjoyable read are the real-life examples interspersed throughout the book. She's gone out and interviewed a number of well-known people and asked them how they fell into their "dream job". What you'll find is that the differences between you and them are not as large as you'd think. In many/most cases, they started with the same fears and concerns you have, along with a feeling that they were missing something in their current sit

Have you ever watched The Office only to realize the skewering social satire is not that far off the reality of your mundane day-to-day life at work? I knew I wanted to read this book the moment I saw the title, and I was fortunate to receive an advance copy from the author's husband. Truly leading by example, Pamela Skillings has written such an entertaining tome on seeking career fulfillment that it stands among the most insightful in an increasingly crowded field. It's a thorough start-to-finish treatise that resonates from Skillings' own story as an aspiring journalist who ended up working in corporate America for twelve years earning a six-figure salary only to realize she was never really satisfied. For most of us, such a revelation, if it ever reaches the level of our consciousness, comes with a wave of dread that crystallizes into a paralyzing fear over an unknown future. With a fluctuating economy that produces constant employment uncertainty, the clarity that comes with living a life of predictable mediocrity may hold a certain appeal to those unwilling to incur a risk by taking a deep-dive journey into themselves. Unbeknownst to them, this book needs to become a must-read because Skillings does an adept job in convincing us to embrace change and not waste most of our days in "toxic workplaces" full of boredom, political plays and even worse. She begins appropriately with a quiz as to your readiness to leave corporate America. Once you know where you are in terms of satisfaction, then she makes clear how you need to plan your escape. First, you need to forego the preconceptions of what job suits you based on the conformist ideas and white-picket-fence dreams of your father's generation. I particularly liked her section on recognizing the warning signs at the workplace and how one should separate economic reality from career fantasies. Skillings manages to be pragmatic without being cynical and goes through the questions of finance and health care with refreshing directness. The bulk of the book focuses on exploring your escape routes, and here she discusses all the possibilities, whether it be a more attractive corporate career, taking extended time off, pursuing job shares or flex time schedules, working in a start-up, building your own business, or even more adventurously, following your creative dreams. As someone who has firsthand experience with corporate downsizings and major reorganizations, I am more than familiar with what Skillings describes so accurately here. In fact, a few years ago, I found myself packing up my desk, handing in my ID, and letting that overwhelming feeling of failure envelope other aspects of my otherwise productive life. I became a consultant in my field of specialty, which is why I read with interest the chapter on "solopreneurship". I wish I had this book back then to guide me through the process because Skillings has such a firm, clear-eyed grasp on how to maximize the opportunity presented by a layof

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