Exploring 5 of the top benefits of career coaching
In today’s ever-changing world, navigating your career path and strategizing your next move can be daunting. That’s where career coaches come in.
At the most basic level, career coaching offers the benefits of helping to craft your CV, refine your cover letters, and create a stand-out LinkedIn profile.
If one takes that coaching a level deeper, however, a career coach can also help you set career goals, project manage your next promotion, visualize your future career path, or make a move into another company or industry altogether.
Before we go into the specifics of how you might know that you need career coaching, let’s first look broadly at 5 of the top benefits of career coaching:
- It helps build your confidence. By focusing on your strengths and selling those strengths in your CV and on your LinkedIn profile, career coaching helps you talk about where you excel and put your energy and attention on the areas of your role that give you job satisfaction and fulfillment.
- It instills a learning mindset. Much of career coaching’s success depends on the coachee’s willingness to self-reflect, understand their strengths and weaknesses, work towards specific goals, and remain agile in their field. This will often require upskilling, further learning, and putting in some extra hours to stand out in their field - all with the help of a coach by your side to motivate you.
- It gives you a more objective view of your career path. It’s not unheard of to turn down roles or opportunities out of fear of failure or an unwillingness to consider a company or industry outside of your comfort zone. The benefit of working with a career coach, however, is access to a new way of thinking and objectively evaluating all of your options - even those that you may never have considered before.
- It focuses on solutions, giving you an action plan to follow and holding you accountable to that plan. Whether your next career move is dependent on better communication skills, how you sell your strengths, or sharpening your skills to give you a competitive advantage over your peers, a career coach is there to shine a light on what actions you can take to make progress and see positive results.
It helps you find more career fulfillment by aligning your strengths with your values and helping you find an industry, employer profile or role that will complement those strengths and values.
FAQs
So, how do you know if you need career coaching, or if it will even work for you? To help you better understand the coaching approach, we’ve rounded up some frequently asked questions that our Erickson career coaches have been confronted with, and given you their answers:
- I’m not sure I ‘believe’ in coaching, what if it doesn’t work for me?
The success of the process relies on how much you’re willing to grow and self-reflect, but what we can say is that it’s been scientifically proven that we can change the neural pathways in our brains over time, creating new ways of seeing and interacting with the world.
- I’m feeling so stuck and unmotivated in my career, I don’t even know where to begin.
The essence of all coaching boils down to one thing: a conversation. That’s how it all starts, and where that conversation goes is entirely up to you and your coach. The idea is that your coach will ask you questions to help you see new perspectives and approach things from a new direction, opening you up to new solutions or pathways that you may not have thought of.
- How can a coach help me navigate my career in an industry that they’ve never worked in themselves?
The beauty about the Erickson coaching approach is that it’s solution-focused, and it relies on you, as the coachee, to find the solutions. In partnering with you, your coach will help you shift your attention away from what’s wrong and towards what you really want. Instead of focusing on what’s not working or what’s missing, your coach will help you see what is working and what is available, and from there you can craft an action to get you closer to your goals. This approach is not specific to certain industries, but rather encompasses a new way of seeing and finding solutions.
- I made the wrong career choice years ago, so now I’m stuck living with my decisions.
In this sort of scenario, your coach might invite you to imagine waking up to a future in which you’re working in a job that fulfills you. In this future scenario, they’ll ask you what’s different, and what you’re doing differently. In asking you to visualize this scenario, they’ll start to work with you on what changes you can make to your life to achieve your desires in spite of your current career, and slowly they’ll work with you craft solutions to alter your life and give it a new direction and purpose that more closely aligns with who you are and what you want out of life.
So now that you know what the career coaching approach might entail, what makes a good career coach and how do you go about finding the right career coach for you?
A good career coach:
- Is an attentive listener
- Asks the right questions
- Is up to date with career and workplace trends, developments and research
- Addresses any skill deficits you may have
- Partners with a coachee to define a clear end goal (so that the coach and coachee know when the goal has been successfully met)
To find a career coach, try these tips:
- Ask your organization’s HR department if they’ve worked with coaching companies or individual coaches. Many organizations now recognize the benefits of coaching for employee development and offer coaching programs as part of their professional
development initiatives.
- Ask your colleagues and peers if they’ve used anyone and rely on word of mouth recommendations.
- Ask training institutions (like Erickson Coaching International) if they have a list of recommended coaches and courses.
- Do your homework around which career coaches may have certifications from an accredited body like International Coaches Federation (ICF)
Whether you’re interested in becoming a professional coach, or you’d like to work on your own self development by undergoing coaching training and learning new skills, our flagship The Art & Science of Coaching™ course is a wonderful starting point on your coaching journey.
It covers skills like:
- Deep listening
- Stepping into a ‘coaching mindset’ to remain present, objective and ‘trigger free’
- Uncovering a person’s unique motivational structures
- Deepening your ability to handle and overcome objections
- Leveraging the power of values to enable commitment and follow-through
If coaching is calling you, or you’re curious to understand our courses better, book an obligation-free call with one of our advisors: https://www.erickson.edu/en/get-in-touch.