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Review: The Complete Job Search Guide for Latinos
By Carol Amoruso, HAV Editor
The Complete Job Search Guide for Latinos is an indispensable
companion for students, entry level and ladder-climbing careerist
Latinos looking to find or more deeply carve out their career niche. It
is both a hand-holder and a prod, a Si se puede for Latinos, a
how-to on parlaying skills and culture into achieving career goals.
Published in 2005, the manual comes at a crucial time for Latinos,
having just assumed the position of the nation’s fastest growing middle
class and poised to fill the gap in professional and managerial
positions left by retiring baby boomers.
Authors Rose Mary Bombela-Tobias and Murray Mann wield a double-edged
sword to success: one side of the cutting blade offers the skills and
strategy needed by all who seek success at a mainstream career, while
the other cutting edge addresses issues crucial to Latinos—those of
culture, putting down prints on untrodden paths, and discrimination.
In reader friendly, down-to-earth prose, the book covers the key
points of any how-to manual for go-getters, always from a Latino
perspective. For example: how to write a résumé that highlights, not
only your marketable skills and past performance, but your background of
language and culture as an invaluable edge as well. The same is true in
chapters on writing career-marketing letters, compiling career
portfolios, ”acing” even the most grueling interview, researching
potential employers, evaluating job offers and negotiating salaries.
Strong personal development and self-evaluation are stressed,
specifically, how to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as they
inform your job performance and work site relationships, and how to
forge your ”career brand” as a unique and invaluable Latino individual.
A chapter on higher ed includes a cogent discussion of associate vs.
4-year degrees and serves as a guide to using your school experience in
ways to best prepare you to be an optimal job candidate.
The Complete Job Search Guide for Latinos argues strongly for
taking a positive approach towards ethnicity, not one of second, but
first class citizenry, to even see your possible accented English a
plus, a welcome signal of how you bring an engaging set of values and
experiences to the workplace as well as sharing common ground with other
diverse workers.
The authors include two topics intrinsic to Latino culture: the
concept of la familia and community is the first, which they say Latinos
must take into account in defining ultimate success. (Nor, do they say,
need success be limited to becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but is
achieved after being true to what you really want to do and being the
very best at it.) The other imperative is to give back. Say Tobias and
Mann, “The true measure of a person’s worth is based on whether he or
she has made a difference in the lives of others.” The authors have
done just that. The Complete Job Search Guide for Latinos is an
important tool in achieving Latino self-fulfillment and ethnic pride as
well as contributing in a special way to this society as a whole.
Other Readings of Interest
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Carol Amoruso
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 Carol
Amoruso has had several vocational callings over the years. She's
taught young children, run volunteer programs for seniors, had a
catering business, designed clothes. Ultimately, she found that
nothing engaged and challenged her the way writing has. She's
written every day since childhood, professionally since 1990. Her
involvement in the arts, society and politics of Africa, the
Caribbean, and the Latin World have been the most inspiring and her
work concentrates on those areas. She travels extensively but lives
in New York City.
IMDiversity.com is committed to presenting diverse points of view.
However, the viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of
the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or
employees at IMD.
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