10 must-read books to help boost your creative career

From insider tips on improving your prospects and discovering the best leadership habits to being the best you can be at work and unleashing your creative potential, the following essential titles will give you a welcome boost.

1. How to Get the Perfect Promotion – A Practical Guide to Improving Your Career Prospects by John Lees

This essential book is a practical guide to developing the best career strategy for you. Building on the success of John Lees' best selling title How to Get a Job You'll Love, this new title will help you to get to the top of your chosen career path. Drawing on the experience of high performers, it looks at how to position yourself for promotion, overcome mental and physical barriers, make office politics work to your advantage, and negotiate a pay rise. Perfect. It's precisely the advice you need.

2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

This recommended book presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centred approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty and human dignity – principles that give us the security to adapt to change, and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

3. The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

You want fewer distractions and less on your plate. The daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings distract you and stress you out. The simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what's the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller pay cheques, fewer promotions – and lots of stress. The One Thing will show you how to be more productive, attract more income and enjoy a better lifestyle.

4. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No magic bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond.

5. Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!) By George Lois

This inspirational guide to creativity and success presents iconic lessons from America's 'Master Communicator', George Lois, and is a bible of breakthrough thinking. A no-holds-barred, in your face compendium of lessons for a life lived to the fullest written for anyone looking to make a creative difference.

6. It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be is a handbook of how to succeed in the world: a pocket bible for the talented and timid alike to help make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible — brought to you by top advertising guru, Paul Arden, who shares his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem-solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right, making mistakes, and creativity.

7. The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry

Many of us assume that our creative process is beyond our ability to influence, and pay attention to it only when it isn't working correctly. For the most part, we go about our daily tasks and everything just "works". Until it doesn't. Now business creativity expert Todd Henry explains how to unleash your creative potential. Whether you're a creative by trade or an "accidental creative", this book will help you quickly and effectively integrate new ideas into your daily life.

8. Career Ahead: The Complete Career Handbook by Jenny Ungless

This book is unique in two ways: it is for anyone in, or unexpectedly out of, work whether they have recently embarked on the career they thought was right for them or have been in it for many years. Divided into four parts, it deals with: how to work out what career you want; how to land the job (CVs, interviews, etc.); making an impact in your new role and doing your own thing – for those considering an entrepreneurial career.

9. Brilliant Career Coach by Sophie Rowan

For anyone who wants to have a more fulfilling and successful work life, this coach-in-a-book will guide you step-by-step through the process of finding your ideal career. Whether you are looking for your next opportunity, stuck in a rut, or even wanting a complete change of career, this book will help you have a happy, successful profession. It is packed with smart advice, clever exercises, insights from world-class careers experts and stories from people, like you, who’ve already taken the journey.

10. Knockout CV: How to Get Noticed, Get Interviewed & Get Hired by John Lees

Drawing on over 25 years' experience of training recruiters, John Lees, author of the bestselling How To Get A Job You'll Love, is one of the UK's best-known career strategists. In Knockout CV, he shows you how to write CVs and cover letters that convey your strengths quickly and get you into the interview room. So if you can't get the promotion you want in your current job, you can successfully move up the ladder at your next.