The purpose of a career coach is to help and support you in:
- Exploring and defining your professional skills, strengths and value
- Addressing issues impacting your career – both positive and negative
- Clearly identifying your career goals
- Understanding and resolving obstacles affecting or threatening your career success
- Creating both short-term and long-range career strategies.
- Developing, executing and managing a successful job search campaign
- Preparing marketing tools and documents to competitively market yourself, network, interview, and to evaluate/negotiate compensation and offers.
A Career Coach is not:
Therapy or Counseling
- A Career Coach does not assess and diagnose a client’s mental health.
- Therapy often deals with problems, pain and grief. A Career Coach deals with the present, future and potential. People do not need a problem to enter into a coaching relationship. Although the client and coach may come upon problems through the coaching process, the coaching relationship deals with them head-on, approaches them as a challenge, and then seeks the path to success above and beyond these problems or obstacles.
- Therapy often deals with a client’s history and the “whys” of that history; A Career Coach addresses the future and the “hows” of making the future what the client wants it to be.
Consulting
- Although there is a fine line between career coaching and consulting, there IS a distinct difference. Consultants (management, organizational, development, etc.) are experts who – based on analyses of problems – advise companies and people on what to do.
- Coaches do NOT advise clients on what to do with their lives. They will acknowledge the potential for aptitude, successes and obstacles. They ARE able to share their expertise of the career industry and job market, to help the client make more informed decisions. But the client has the answers.
What are business leaders saying about coaching?
“The goal of coaching is the goal of good management – to make the most of an organization’s valuable resources.”
Harvard Business Review
“Career management coaches can identify missing skills or style difficulties and other pragmatic tips”
Wall Street Journal
“A career coach may be the guardian angel you need to rev up your career.”
Money
“The benefits of coaching appear to win over even the most cynical clients within just a few weeks.”
Industry Week
“Asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from the career coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than 0,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies.”
Fortune
“Other companies offer coaching as a prerequisite to proven managers, in the understanding that everyone can benefit from a detached observer.”
New York Times
“Need a life? Get a coach.”
Newsweek
“Coaching is about helping people slam shut the gap between what they’ve got now and what they want for themselves.”
Inc.
“If athletes, singers and actors can use coaches to deliver the best performance possible, there’s no reason working moms shouldn’t have the same hidden helper when it comes to competing in the demanding business world.”
Working Mother
