What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

Of course, a job-hunter might—on occasion—phone his or her
counselor the day before an interview, to get some last-minute
tips or to answer some questions that a prospective interviewer
might ask, tomorrow.
What is different, today, is that in some cases, career
counseling is being conducted exclusively over the phone from
start to finish. Some counselors now report that they haven’t laid
eyes on over 90% of their clients, and wouldn’t know them if
they bumped into them on a street corner. I call this “distancecoaching”
or “telephone-counseling.”
With the invention of the Internet, with the invention of
Internet telephoning, we are witnessing “the death of
distance”—that is to say, the death of distance as an obstacle.
The world, as the wonderful New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman has famously written, is in effect flat.
An increasing number of counselors or executive coaches are
doing this distance-counseling. This increasing availability of
“distance-counseling” is good news, and bad news.
Why good news? Well, in the old days you might be a jobhunter
in some remote village, with a population of only eightyfive,
back in the hills somewhere, or you might be living
somewhere in France or in China, miles from any career
counselor or coach, and so, be totally out of luck. Now, these
days you can be anywhere in the world, but as long as you have
the Internet on your desk or in your hand, you can still connect
with the best distance-counseling there is.
And the bad news?
Well, just because a counselor or coach does distancecounseling
or phone-counseling, doesn’t mean they are really
good at doing it. Some are superb; but some are not. So, you’re
still going to have to research any distance-counselor very
carefully.
It is altogether too easy for a counselor to get sloppy doing
distance-counseling—for example, browsing the newspapers
while you are telling some long personal story, etc., to which
they are giving only the briefest attention. (Of course, the
increasingly wider use of video calling programs such as Skype