Books: Going back to work
For anyone returning to paid work after years out of it. A thin shelf, and honestly so. Every entry says who it is not for, which is the useful part and the part nobody else prints.
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Going back to work: 3 books
Ordered by how well evidenced they are rather than by how good they are, because those are different questions and the second one depends on who you are.
Carol Fishman Cohen, Vivian Steir Rabin · Warner Business Books · first published 2007 · 309 pages
Carol Fishman Cohen co-founded iRelaunch, a career-reentry consulting firm; Vivian Steir Rabin is a career coach and journalist.
A guide for people re-entering paid work after a career break — how to explain a resume gap, update outdated skills, and interview after years away from the workforce.
Read it if Someone who left the workforce for years, often to raise kids, and now needs to return to paid work after divorce.
Do not read it if Someone whose career was continuous and just needs general job-search help — this book’s entire value is specifically about bridging a gap.
Check the edition This is the 2007 edition. Job-search mechanics — LinkedIn, applicant tracking systems, remote work norms — have changed substantially since; treat the gap-bridging strategy as sound and the tactical details as dated.
No rating we could verify — we leave this blank rather than repeat a number we have not seen at its source.
Richard Nelson Bolles · Ten Speed Pr · first published 1979 · 346 pages
Richard Bolles was a career counselor and a pioneer of the modern job-search self-help genre.
A classic job-hunting workbook built around self-assessment exercises (the ‘flower exercise’), plus practical networking, resume, and interview strategy.
Read it if Someone who needs to re-enter or re-navigate the job market after divorce and wants a structured self-assessment tool.
Do not read it if Whoever ends up with this specific 1979 printing — the book is revised annually, and this edition predates online job applications, LinkedIn, and most of the modern job-search infrastructure entirely.
Check the edition This is the original 1979 edition. Get the current year’s edition; the book’s whole value proposition is that it’s kept up to date, and this listed printing isn’t.
No rating we could verify — we leave this blank rather than repeat a number we have not seen at its source.
Bill Burnett, Evans, Dave · WaterBrook Press · first published 2018 · 144 pages
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans taught the ‘Designing Your Life’ course at Stanford’s d.school.
A workbook of design-thinking exercises — prototyping small experiments, reframing stuck problems — applied to figuring out career and life direction.
Read it if Someone with some stability and bandwidth who wants structured reflection on what their post-divorce life or career should look like.
Do not read it if Someone in acute financial crisis who needs an income now — this is a reflective planning tool, not a job-search-this-week manual.
Popular, weakly evidenced Design-thinking-for-life is a popular pedagogical framework from a Stanford course; its claims about life outcomes aren’t backed by rigorous longitudinal research, however useful people find the exercises.
No rating we could verify — we leave this blank rather than repeat a number we have not seen at its source.
Every title, author, publisher, year, page count and ISBN here was checked against a bibliographic database rather than typed from memory, and the candidates that could not be confirmed were dropped rather than guessed at. Ratings are shown only where we could see them at source, which is why several books have none — a blank is honest and an invented four-point-three is not. The judgments about what a book is worth are ours, they are opinions, and you are entitled to disagree with them. Tell us when we are wrong.
Compiled 31 August 2026. Bibliographic data from Open Library. Prices, editions and availability change constantly; the links go to the current listing.