By many recent accounts, the corporate world has become harsh, especially toward young, inexperienced employees. As many senior businesspeople continue to progress in their careers, a significant segment of young professionals are finding it hard to cope with the strong competition, move up the ladder, and take on leadership roles due to a range of factors.
Carla Mashinski, in her book Five Attributes to a Successful Career: Change Your Career Path with a Practical Roadmap to Overcome the Challenges and Achieve Success, shares her real-life experiences and career journey. The book acts as a guide for professionals, including but not limited to early-career individuals, seeking direction or advice to progress in their career. She provides insight into her career progression, offering practical tips based on different aspects of her professional journey to encourage readers to learn from her successes and missteps.
The author does an excellent job of explaining these five desirable attributes based on workplace anecdotes and examples of best practices and pitfalls to avoid. She explains a situation and then states the attribute connected to that experience. She describes the attributes in detail and advises readers on how they can achieve each one by giving a summary of main takeaways and an action plan. The way Mashinski takes readers through a step-by-step process of how she handles professional hardships and setbacks and teaches readers how to tackle on-the-job challenges is fascinating.
Early-career professionals will find that this book acts as a great guide. Moreover, experienced professionals will be able to relate to most of the book’s central concepts and examples and likely glean useful tidbits from it.
The book emphasizes the importance of ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion, important subjects for every professional and company. The author also explains her career journey through a psychological lens, focusing on how our minds perceive various workplace situations and how we can cope with challenges and take advantage of opportunities.
Whether you’re a seasoned executive or just starting out on your career journey, the information in the book will probably resonate with you. I don’t think there’s any professional out there who wouldn’t benefit from reading this book due to Mashinski’s skill at sharing useful tips based on what she’s learned from the various jobs she’s had.
August 2023
