Escape from Corporate America A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams

Journalist Skillings aims to rescue Americans from corporate tedium in this entertaining and informative guide to walking away from an established—albeit stultifying—job and forging a more rewarding career. With insight and humor, Skillings enumerates the stages of Corporate Disillusionment and the features of the toxic workplace—the bullying bosses, moronic co-workers, terminal boredom and rampant racism and sexism. A multitude of questionnaires, exercises and worksheets helps readers determine their dream job, assess expenses and assets, and plot an escape plan to break free of corporate life without going bankrupt. Skillings also provides pointers to those readers who simply want to be happier in their current jobs—including negotiating for more flexible hours, telecommuting and taking sabbaticals. Vignettes of successful fugitives from the corporate world populate the book and an extremely useful Escape Tool Kit supplies information on where and how to find career coaches, health insurance, job listings and a wealth of other much needed resources when embarking on career change. Comprehensive, informative and witty, this book will be indispensable to those looking to start new careers with concrete plans and well-defined goals. (May)
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User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars A Breath of Fresh Air for the Future Entrepreneur!
This book not only provides stories on real people who have escaped, it is a wealth of on-line information. It definitely inspired me to consider hanging up my corporate hat. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever felt that they didn’t belong in the corporate world but were too afraid to try something different.

5 Stars This book covers all the basic options available to someone who is tired of the rat race and wants something different.

This was a nice little book. I especially liked the cheery yellow cover. It is divided into three sections and 12 chapters as follows:

I. Plan your escape (1-4)

II. Exploring your escape routes (5-11)

III. Going over the wall (12)

1. This is not your father’s job market

2. The trouble with the rat race

3. True callings and wrong numbers

4. Let’s get practical

5. Corporate jobs that don’t suck

6. Take a break

7. Swim in a smaller pond

8. Go solo

9. Build a business

10. Follow your creative dreams

11. Make a difference

12. Going over the wall

A. Have a nice escape

B. The escape toolkit

C. Meet the escape artists

I thought the book was well written and well organized. I liked the 5-page quiz entitled “Are you a corporate casualty? The author has invested 12 years in corporate America. And then she bailed. She now operates her own consulting shop. She says she spent 3 years talking to 200+ people in order to research this book. And it shows. The book’s content makes sense, sounds like it has been well researched, and provides value to anyone who is thinking of following the author’s lead and “escaping.”

Since I am a SCORE (Senior Corps of Retired Executives) counselor who helps members of this book’s target audience on a daily basis, my favorite chapters were 8, 9, and 12. Those are the topics I usually discuss with my SCORE clients. But this book covers all the basic options available to someone who is tired of the rat race and wants something different. 5 stars!

5 Stars Excellent career-changing advice with good humor
Pam’s approach to escaping corporate America is realistic, direct, and is almost as if she’s walking you through the process while standing right next to you and making sure you tackle every step without any obstacles. Her approach is extremely practical and doesn’t even need to be read by the corporate worker; anyone looking for some sort of job change (or even a book for leisure reading) will get ideas and inspiration from Skillings’s detailed writeup of how you can take charge of your career, find happiness, and pursue your dreams.

5 Stars Practical advice!
This is a fantastic resource and an interesting read because it contains personal anecdotes from interesting, well-known personalities. This book really offers practical tips on the 9-to-5 and all its alternatives. If you are considering a job or career change, it’s a must-read. I loved this book because it really broadened my perspective on how to make six-figure incomes without poring over job search sites like RiseSmart or Monster.

4 Stars A useful toolbox for making the change you want
“Escape from Corporate America” doesn’t have the glitz and personality, the audacity and intensity, the big dream and the big promise, of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, a book I found both inspirational and thought-provoking. On the other hand, “Escape…” is a good deal more practical, in that while Ferriss sort of glossed over the part about setting up a stand-alone business that generates thousands of dollars with little or no effort, Pamela Skillings leaves nothing to chance in helping you decide whether “escaping” is right for you, and if so, how to do it.

Leaving a job, even an unhappy one, is no small matter, and if the reader takes nothing else from “Escape from Corporate America,” it would be that you need to give that the hard work and planning such a change deserves. Whether you’re burned out, bored, or just vaguely unsatisfied, this book serves many of the functions of a professional “lifestyle coach” (at a fraction of the price). From helping you get to the bottom of why exactly you’re unhappy with your current situation … to showing you how to identify alternatives and weigh the pros and cons … to helping you tell the boss you’re leaving without burning any bridges, there’s a lot of useful information packed into these pages. She even gives you seven pages of financial-planning worksheets to help ensure you have a clear picture of what you’ll need — and what you don’t need — as you make the big shift.

The dream of escaping corporate America takes as many forms as there are people to have the dream, of course, and Skillings has something to offer a wide variety of dreamers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur who wants to conquer the business world as your own boss rather than someone else’s wage slave … or poet, artist, or musician who took a straight job to pay the bills and discovered with a shock that you now have a decade-long career you never counted on, I think this book can go a long way toward helping you start achieving what you’re looking for. That might not be tangos in Argentina