What is Career Coaching and How do I Know if I Need it? 

What is career coaching?

Career coaching is often mistaken for career advice. At a point where someone is facing a change in their career, such as looking for a new role, navigating a redundancy or changing sectors altogether, there is a need to seek out guidance about what to do.

A career coach won’t tell you what to do, but rather, they will help you to work through the decision-making process in a way that allows you to think about what is going to be right for you, not what other people think you should do.

Career coaches use insightful questions to provoke new thinking. They reflect and feedback on the words you use, and the body language you express, and help you to hear your thoughts more clearly than when they are just in your own head. A coach can provide you with a level of challenge to the assumptions you are making and help you to see possibilities that you might not have considered. Most importantly, they will support you to take actions that will move you towards your goal and help you to achieve more together than you could have done on your own.

There is accountability with a coach, knowing that you will have a fixed time to reflect on your own development, and there is something powerful about another person being invested in your success.

There will be many experts in the field in which you are working that you can seek advice from, but you are the expert in you. Only you know what your dreams and goals are and how it feels to navigate the world of work with your unique approach and set of circumstances. Even people whose careers you admire will be different to you in a myriad of ways, so whilst you might want the same outcome, how you get there will be unique to you. A coach will help you articulate your unique version of success and work towards making your dreams a reality.

How do you know if you need a career coach?

If you are contemplating a significant change in your career a coach can help you to work through the questions and decisions that you will go through. People often decide to work with a coach either when they feel stuck and don’t know how to proceed on their own or they know that the decision they need to make is an important one, and they want to carve out the time and thinking space to work through their options.

Working with a coach isn’t just about the sessions you have together; the thinking continues between the sessions and beyond your time together. Coaching isn’t about being told the answers; it’s about finding them inside of yourself. 

 

If you want to understand more about getting the most out of yourself and your fulfilment at work read this article.