Career Coaching

A career coach is someone who helps you develop your career. What is a career? It is a series of steps you make in your professional life. It is not necessarily climbing up the corporate hierarchy, it may be quitting your job instead and stepping aside for a while. It might mean a year off doing volunteer work in Africa, for example. Most typically it is a series of placements, a list of different jobs. You might like to consider what your life objectives are, what kind of life you want to live in five or ten years, where, with whom, doing what. Would you like 80-hour work weeks and lots of money or perhaps flexible working hours and just something interesting to do?

What does it mean to develop a career? It means knowing what you want and working to achieve this. Doing something 24/7/365. To achieve this you must have a master plan and a tactical plan for your career. And then you need to execute it. And correct your plan, if necessary.

If your dream is to work for Google it won’t happen just sitting at home and waiting someone to call you. You might not qualify for CEO of Google, but you might find out what kind of people they are looking for and compare their needs with your qualifications and qualities. If you realize that you might have a chance you might like to find out the ways to get an interview. Probably you need a nice resume, a compelling cover letter; perhaps a few references might be helpful as well. Your career coach can help with all this. If you land an interview, then it would be silly not to practice a little before going there. You do not know exactly what they will ask, but a professional coach can predict probable fields covered in the job interview and even probable questions. You only get once chance to make a first impression. If you go to an important meeting, you had better be prepared. What is the chance you’ll get your dream job offer after first appointment? Well, not ninety-nine percent. A career coach is helpful for discussing things after an unsuccessful interview, to help you understand what went wrong.

Master plan. For planning you need a vision, a dream or even few of these. Dreaming is important. But it is not enough. You need to do some work to get the plan ready. A coach can help you.

Alternatives. You might not be sure what you want. This is quite normal. But if you want and need a career you have to make some choices. This is your strategy and this will be the basis for your plan. That is, until you want to change or modify it.

You may need a next step and you might like to have an attentive and focused discussion partner for this, who

• helps you in your self-assessment,
• lists options for next steps,
• helps monitor your progress

Do you feel you might need an informal discussion with a coach to decide whether career coaching might be something for you?

Please drop us a note and we will get in touch soon