Do I need a career coach?

What is career coaching? Career coaching is about your next step in your career, no matter where you are now.

Person centred career coaching will meet you where you are, whether you're a student, someone in transition from one sector or job to another, or had a recent redundancy or promotion requiring coaching and mentoring support.

Coaching will positively support redundancy situations and options can include having a bespoke CV produced on your behalf. Alternatively, producing your own from the sessions and development work completed.

The coaching relationship and coaching itself are essential to this process, as it identifies individual-specific skills and qualities. Covering areas like the length of your CV and style, your covering letters, and the appropriate searches you might consider, also social media sites that will enable employers and recruitment agencies to contact you directly. Not all job vacancies are advertised - many employers select potential employees from social media sites.

Coaching sessions also reveal those individual interpersonal skills, knowledge and experience that make you who you are. You are unique and the qualities you have are unique.

Recruitment agencies and others want to see interpersonal skills as well as job skills knowledge and experience. Coaching will draw on those areas of experience you may not immediately recognise as being essential.

Coaching can prepare you for interview, giving you the confidence to answer those challenging unexpected questions.

What is career coaching designed to do?

In essence, the coaching relationship and the practical results all aim towards making you, your CV, and your skills stand out from the other applicants in the application process. The initial stage in the recruitment process decides on the selection for interview, often referred to as the ‘first sift.’

To be in that sift, your CV and covering letter must convince the panel or agency that you have the skills required to be selected for interview.

How will person centred coaching work for me?

Sessions will examine the jobs and positions that you have had, highlighting those areas of success in your career and those areas that really helped you to recognise what positions gave you joy and experience that makes you the unique person that you are.

These areas could have been part-time or short-term, or temporary positions that you loved and excelled in.

• In redundancy, you may want to change your career focus or just continue in the work and the sector that you feel is for you.
• In transition from one job to another, coaching can give you the support and the confidence to settle into a new role more quickly. Alternatively, it can prepare you and your CV for a slightly different or completely different alternative.
• As a new promotion either in the same company or in a new one, career coaching can help and support you in clarifying what your initial focus is. Then it will help you to learn and meet the job requirements of the role more easily.

In short, any situation where your career, education or work needs support and guidance or is in a period of change. Coaching can support you in taking the right steps to achieve success, by meeting you where you are.

How solutions-focused career coaching is beneficial

You may have never discussed your career in a focused and specific conversation since leaving school. Career coaching will give you the opportunity to do this, with professional guidance, helping you to recognise your strengths.

The main quality of career coaching is that this approach is person centred. This means that the client’s career/education to date is discussed within their individual personal experiential journey. Bringing out those qualities, skills, knowledge, and experience that are individual to you.

These discussions can lead to the client discovering their own unique selling points (USP). Giving you and your CV unique benefits in the employment market. In a nutshell, it focuses the whole approach and process from the start to finish on maximising skills, knowledge, talents and the experience that are bespoke to you.

For example, a person who has worked in one company in the same job role for 25 years may not be aware of the additional skills that they have developed as a direct result of their experience. These skills, usually (not always) fall into the category of relational skills. Skills like communication, coordination, and building customer confidence.

Interpersonal skills are highly valued in most job roles and are valuable across all sectors. Giving examples of the way you use these skills is attractive to most employers, and coaching can easily identify them and help you to present them to be attractive in the employment market.

Most people do not need to revise their own CV and look at the jobs market in detail until change demands that they do so. Therefore, career coaching is invaluable to maximise your opportunities of presenting your best self in the employment market.