Books on Interesting Careers

By Kaitlyn Spotts | May 11 2023 | Education & Professional LearningGeneral

Many students are looking to make the next step as they leave high school and start thinking about their future. Whether they’re planning to attend college, pursue a trade, play a sport, or learn a new skill, they can build a successful career tailored to their specific interests and talents.

We put together a list of books by authors who followed their own unique path to a career they loved, along with titles offering guidance about planning for the future.

Browse books on interesting careers

Discover Yourself, Design Your Future, and Plan for Your Dream Job
9781984858627
Today’s adolescents face unprecedented challenges. As a teenager, how do you pick a great-for-you job or college major that will finance your future? You need a plan!
$15.99 US
Apr 05, 2022
Paperback
208 Pages
Ten Speed Press

Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College
9781946885470
Every year, the cost of a four-year degree goes up, and the value goes down. But for many students, there's a better answer.  So many things are getting faster and cheaper. Movies stream into your living room, without ticket or concession-stand costs. The world's libraries are at your fingertips instantly, and for free.  So why is a college education the only thing that seems immune to change? Colleges and universities operate much as they did 40 years ago, with one major exception: tuition expenses have risen dramatically. What's more, earning a degree takes longer than ever before, with the average time to graduate now over five years.  As a result, graduates often struggle with enormous debt burdens. Even worse, they often find that degrees did not prepare them to obtain and succeed at good jobs in growing sectors of the economy. While many learners today would thrive with an efficient and affordable postsecondary education, the slow and pricey road to a bachelor's degree is starkly the opposite. In A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, Ryan Craig documents the early days of a revolution that will transform—or make obsolete—many colleges and universities. Alternative routes to great first jobs that do not involve a bachelor's degree are sprouting up all over the place. Bootcamps, income-share programs, apprenticeships, and staffing models are attractive alternatives to great jobs in numerous growing sectors of the economy: coding, healthcare, sales, digital marketing, finance and accounting, insurance, and data analytics.  A New U is the first roadmap to these groundbreaking programs, which will lead to more student choice, better matches with employers, higher return on investment of cost and time, and stronger economic growth.
$24.95 US
Sep 11, 2018
Hardcover
320 Pages
BenBella Books

The Ultimate Guide to Planning Your Future
9780744051728
From robotics engineering and computer games development to environmental law and eco-friendly construction, this job guide features hundreds of careers, including trending opportunities.
$19.99 US
Mar 22, 2022
Paperback
320 Pages
DK Children

How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
9781101875322
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.
$28.00 US
Sep 20, 2016
Hardcover
272 Pages
Knopf

How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
9780525566236
App Kid is an inspiring and deeply personal coming of age memoir from one of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs—a second-generation Latino immigrant who taught himself how to code as a thirteen-year-old and went on to claim his share of the American dream.
$17.00 US
Aug 30, 2022
Paperback
304 Pages
Vintage

Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters
9781984858085
A vibrant, illustrated guide to blazing a unique and fulfilling creative path, from the Stanford d.school.
$15.99 US
Oct 04, 2022
Paperback
144 Pages
Ten Speed Press

9780593176030
Adapted for young adults, this inspiring memoir chronicles Top Chef star and Forbes and Zagat 30 Under 30 phenom Kwame Onwuachi's incredible--and odds-defying--rise to fame in the food world after a tough childhood in the Bronx and Nigeria.
$11.99 US
Jan 25, 2022
Paperback
272 Pages
Ember

Designing Your Path from College to Career
9780452296008
Fully revised and updated in 2017, the revolutionary career guide for a new generation of job-seekers, from one of the U.S.’s top career counselors “So what are you going to do with your major?”   It’s an innocent question that can haunt students from high school to graduate school and beyond.   Relax. Your major is just the starting point for designing a meaningful future. In this indispensable guide, Dr. Katharine Brooks shows you a creative, fun, and intelligent way to figure out what you want to do and how to get it—no matter what you studied in college. You will learn to map your experiences for insights into your strengths and passions, design possible lives, and create goals destined to take you wherever you want to go. Using techniques and ideas that have guided thousands of college students to successful careers, Dr. Brooks will teach you to outsmart and outperform your competition, with more Wisdom Builders and an easily applied career development process.   No matter what career you aspire to, You Majored in What? offers a practical, creative, and successful approach to finding your path to career fulfillment.
$19.00 US
Mar 30, 2010
Paperback
352 Pages
Plume