Julia Ivy’s Crafting Your Edge for Today’s Job Market is arguably one of the most important books of its type to emerge in recent memory. Her credentials make this less than surprising. Ivy is a professor of Strategy and International Business Group at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northwestern University as well as a Faculty Director for the MS in International Business. She has extensive consulting and executive leadership coaching experience, She promotes a multi-discipline approach to business issues incorporating psychology and his garnered numerous awards for her work. The Boston based academic travels the world in her capacity as a consultant, but as a teacher and learner as well. The considerable skills she brings to bear are evident on each page of this book.
Her BE-EDGE method for approaching the modern job market has enabled countless young men and women to find success beginning their professional lives, but I believe her approach has universal application. This book isn’t very long, but she does a deft job of encompassing the full breadth of her method within a little over one hundred pages packed with data, charts, and other graphics illustrating the information that forms the backbone of her work. Moreover, her writing throughout Crafting Your Edge helps clarify her ideas for the reader even more – though she hails from an academic background, she doesn’t write like one. The fact she is invested in the success of her readers is clear over the course of this book and she has a clear passion for sharing what she has learned over the course of her teaching career.
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She has included some data intensive appendicies after the primary portion of the book is over that interested readers can study. These appendices share the same academic bent as the earlier parts of the book, but they likewise refrain from bogging the reader down in minuta. Her teaching instinicts are apparent on every page. A good teacher does not obscure, but instructs and reveals. The exercises she includes throughout the book, properly deemed homework given her background, are welcome elenebts in the text as well. They are laid out in an easy to understand fashion but nonetheless should prove stimulating to those interested in working through each of them.
Ivy is an inventive thinker, never resting on the status quo, and clearly seeks to push and inspire the young to realize the full range of their dreams, gifts, and skills. We certainly should consider this book as an extension of her classroom and academic work, but it is likewise a way of giving back to those embarking on their professional careers. Numerous testimonials included with the book attest to the fruits her methods bear and the brief length of the book should likewise prove inviting to people leading busy lives, but the book demands to be studied and read from beginning to end rather than being dipped into here and there. Julia Ivy’s Crafting Your Edge for Today’s Job Market is one of the best books about making your way through the modern job market I have read in quite some time.
Clay Burton