Career coaching was born out of clients’ desire to talk about their work and where they were heading. And despite the economic downturn of recent years, it’s still a rewarding exercise, both for client and coach, says Steve Crabb
You might think that the five years of unrelenting economic misery we’ve been living through would have sucked the joy out of even the most upbeat career coach. In fact, this small, but growing community of specialists is in good spirits.
“Career coaching is incredibly rewarding – it’s a joy,” insists ICF master coach Marianne Craig. Career Counselling Services’
Robert Nathan agrees: “There’s something incredibly energising about helping someone take control of their future and align their work and their life,” he said.
Today’s career coaching profession grew largely out of two distinct movements: interest in coaching and outplacement.
Anji Marychurch is director of Career Coaching. Her path into the area began in the mid-1990s:
“I was working in learning and development at the time, and I wanted to find a role that was compatible with parenthood. The University of Westminster asked me to develop short courses for people returning to work after a career break, and that gave me my first insights into what became career coaching.”
As part of her preparation for the courses she led, Marychurch interviewed the 12 leading outplacement firms of the day to gain an understanding of what they offered and how they operated. She ended up working as an associate with several of them.
“I never looked back. Independent working suited my personality and lifestyle,” she says. She has been a career coach for more than 15 years, working with a mix of private clients and corporates.
Craig has been a career coach for 14 years and is founder of career coach training business, Firework. Like many of her peers, she began as a life coach, with a largely female client base. “I soon realised how many of the people I was coaching wanted to talk about work, and where they were going,” she says.
As a result she developed a specialist career coaching practice – and soon found the gender balance shifting towards men.
Career coaches are as diverse as the clients they work with, says Marychurch: “If you are going to coach senior executives, it helps if you have experience in a number of roles; you need a degree of gravitas if you are going to hold your own. You need personal confidence and the ability to inspire it in others.”
Lynne Spencer, who trains career coaches as well as practising herself, believes knowledge about the job market and how it operates is also essential. “That’s the defining difference between general coaching and career coaching,” she says. “Having that knowledge helps speed things up. Sometimes you have to be prepared to intervene more than you might in other types of coaching.”
Where next?
Most career coaches agree they are likely to call on the full spectrum of coaching styles – from an open and non-directional approach to more leading forms of questioning. Much, of course, depends on who is footing the bill.
Clients fall into three broad categories: ones who are referred by their employers to help them plan future career paths; ones who fund themselves, and ones who are in crisis and need immediate help.
Beyond those broad categories (and they are more overlapping circles in a Venn diagram than distinct silos), clients come in all shapes and sizes. Private, self-funding clients are typically mid-career, 35 to 55-year olds who can afford fees of £1,500 and upwards for a series of sessions. However, the career coaches we spoke to (and whose fees we did not ascertain) reported seeing an increasing number of younger clients who’ve hit an unexpected career plateau in their 20s, and even new graduates.
“We’ve had parents and grandparents paying for young people to receive career coaching,” says Nathan.
“It’s incredibly tough out there for young people,” Spencer notes. “Internships have made it a lot harder for people to break into the world of work: you need to have well-off parents to support you through a period of unpaid work like this, and the vast majority of internships are never advertised so you need well-connected parents to even find out about them and get on the first rung of the ladder. And further up, baby boomers aren’t vacating the well-paid senior jobs the way they used to – they are hanging on as long as they can.”
However, it’s the mid-career executives who still provide the majority of income for independent career coaches – whether as a way of taking control, or because they face redundancy.
“Not all private clients want a radical new direction – it’s often about taking stock and reflecting on where they are in their lives and their careers,” says Nathan. “Some professions are particularly bad at helping their staff plan their futures and thinking about them as anything more than fee earners. That’s certainly true of many law firms, but we are seeing increasing numbers of doctors, too.”
Craig tells the story of a client from a professional services firm who came to her thinking about leaving her job to pursue her real passion of archaeology. After a number of career coaching sessions, her client realised that financial security was very important to her, so she concentrated on freeing up time at evenings and weekends. “Coaching helped her think how to create a different kind of life,” says Craig.
Letting go
With clients who are at risk of losing their jobs or who have already been ‘let go’, it’s empathy not sympathy that matters, says Marychurch. “There’s no point in getting in the swamp with someone who’s looking for you to pull them out. You can assist them far better from the bank.”
Men, in particular, lose their sense of identity when they lose their jobs, Marychurch adds. “You have to help them become aware of how they are feeling about being let go. For that, you need the ability to listen deeply and not offer trite solutions – people want to be heard and talk about how they were treated. Until that’s out of the way they can’t move forward effectively.
“You get some people who are in an indecent haste to rewrite their CV and get on with it – the career coach’s job is to help them take stock,” says Marychurch.
Deeply embedded
The third branch of career coaching – and the fastest growing – is in-company work. Between them, Spencer (who runs the CIPD’s two-day career coaching training courses) and Nathan (who runs five-day courses at Career Counselling Services for new career coaches, and one-day courses for experienced coaches who want an introduction to it), have trained hundreds of career coaches. Many work in-company in learning and development or HR day jobs. An increasing number of their students are line managers – a trend observed as long ago as
2006, in a study by Wendy Hirsh for the Institute for Employment Studies (bit.ly/1egGJC3).
“In-company career coaching programmes used to be fragile creatures,” says Nathan. “They were usually the pet project of an executive, and when they moved on, the programme would wither and die. Today’s career coaching programmes are becoming much more deeply embedded in organisational culture and are much more robust as a result.”
Nathan’s business has trained 30 career coaches for one large local authority, while the BBC has a cohort of 50 internal career coaches.
According to Spencer, the distinction between genuine in-house career coaching and traditional talent management is that the former enables individuals to make decisions for themselves, giving them a range of options so they can choose their direction, which may be external to the organisation.
But surely a corporate that invests in career coaching isn’t going to be best pleased if their high-flier decides to resign and go travelling? Writing in the journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling (issue 30, March 2013), Robert Nathan and Wendy Hirsh pointed out: “The key difference in an employing organisation is that it may be more complex to know exactly ‘who is the client’. When an individual comes to you directly, it’s purer in a way.”
Marychurch says some employers can be refreshingly open-minded and supportive, although she says that in-house coaching conversations are more likely to be aligned with the needs of the business as well as the individual. However, she has worked with corporates who accept that supporting valued people to look at their options before making their final decision can bring benefits to both parties.
Nathan notes that such enlightened behaviour is still more common in not-for-profit organisations, although major consulting firms like PwC and KPMG have well-established career coaching functions and are developing in-house mentors.
Larger corporations can also offer career changes within a group – so valued employees can move on without actually leaving.
The huge demand for places on career coaching training courses and the flourishing of in-company programmes suggests career coaching is becoming an established discipline. It’s far from mature yet, and at times the overlaps with outplacement and talent management make it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
But it looks very much like a movement whose time is about to come.
Network Rail’s strategy
Network Rail is making major strides towards developing people in a more systematic way, according to talent and executive development manager, Diana Hogbin-Mills. “Previously, there were pockets of good practice, but now we are launching a group-wide career coaching portal to help people manage their careers and become more self-reliant.”
This initiative is part of a wider strategy that aims to ensure that Network Rail employees receive 10 per cent of their professional development through formal qualifications, 20 per cent through coaching and mentoring and 70 per cent through on-the-job learning. The portal will allow employees to select their own career coach from a list of in-house providers.
It reflects Network Rail’s increasing need to retain scarce talent; the organisation will require significant numbers of electrical engineers over the next few years to achieve its business plans, just at the time when the National Grid is gearing up for a major infrastructure investment programme. It means that both organisations will be fishing in a pool that’s already too small to comfortably meet existing needs.
“We’re also operating in an increasingly international market,” says Hogbin-Mills. “We are working with a wide range of overseas partners, including Commonwealth countries with ageing infrastructures. This is creating new opportunities for people to develop their careers, which we haven’t experienced before.”
Coaching at Work, Volume 9, Issue 2