What are the best things that career coaches do?
From helping their clients discover a passion to building clarity and confidence, here are the 12 answers to the question, “What are the best things that career coaches do?”
- Help Clients Discover Their Passions
- Improve Your Personal Brand
- Navigate Professional Lives
- Anticipate Fatal Potholes to Avoid on Your Career Path
- Provide Data Analysis
- Assist Your Workplace Interactions
- Cultivate Self-Love by Seeing You
- Inspire Individuals to Find Inner Professional Purpose
- Frame a New Perspective
- Prep You for Interviews
- Give an Outside Perspective
- Build Clarity and Confidence
Help Clients Discover Their Passions
Through coaching sessions, a career coach will help guide their client to understand what their ideal job would be. They do this by asking them questions and giving them prompts to understand what environment and industry are the best fit.
Essentially, career coaches are the vessel that helps their clients reveal their genuine passions so that they can find jobs that fit their requirements and align with their purpose in life.
Gregg Dean, Co-Founder & CEO, Layla Sleep
Improve Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand comprises terms that spring to mind when people think of you. The way you present yourself in various contexts. Your interactions with others and the quality of the work you create can both increase or decrease your profile’s visibility.
In an organization, work is everything you create in your official or unofficial capacity. Your work, as the outside world perceives it, could be the content you produce, the books you write, or the expertise you impart to others. When seeking to improve or establish one’s personal brand, one option is to hire the services of a career coach.
Kenny Kline, President & Financial Lead, BarBend
Navigate Professional Lives
One thing that career coaches do is assess an individual’s strengths, skills, and values to determine the best career path for them. They may also help with resume writing and job searching, as well as offering guidance on how to negotiate salaries and promotions.
In addition, career coaches can provide support and encouragement during times of change, such as transitioning to a new job or field. They can also help individuals develop leadership skills and navigate office politics.
Overall, career coaches aim to help individuals achieve career success and satisfaction by providing guidance, support, and tools to navigate the complex world of work.
Brian Clark, Founder, United Medical Education
Anticipate Fatal Potholes to Avoid on Your Career Path
Experience, they say, is the best teacher. But there are fatal and game-ending experiences in your career where you don’t get the opportunity to practice the lessons learned.These are the experiences a genuine career coach can save you from. A career coach—particularly one with firsthand experience in your industry—knows the potentially fatal potholes in the career path you intend to ply. They possibly have suffered scars from running into those potholes, giving you a unique opportunity to learn from their regrets. Now equipped with such an anticipatory vision of your career path, your navigation is massively boosted, and this gives you the unfair advantage of getting around gridlocks your mates or competitors would be stuck in.Ultimately, with a career coach by your side, you can safely and legally do 90mph in a 50 zone (drive speedily through your career).
Lotus Felix, CEO, Lotusbrains Studio
Provide Data Analysis
People sometimes assume a career coach is like a therapist: someone who can look into your brain and figure out the right job for you. While this kind of personality evaluation can be helpful, career coaches actually bring a good deal more to the table.Data analysis can be an under-appreciated aspect of what a career coach does. They have to understand the job market and where it’s heading, and that requires pouring over the latest statistics. In fact, career coaches often know about industry swings before anyone else because they can identify trends early on. This allows them to give time-sensitive advice to recent graduates, which is indispensable.
Rob Reeves, CEO & President, Redfish Technology
Assist Your Workplace Interactions
Once in a while, you could work with or comprehend coworkers who are difficult. You can get guidance from a career counselor on how to handle difficult work connections.
Career coaches can be of great help when you are struggling with maintaining workplace relationships. Additionally, they can assist you in developing the problem-solving and communication skills you need to create and maintain effective working relationships.
Workplace relationships are of utmost importance for making the operation run smoothly and for teamwork to flourish. Thus, your career coach can aid your team’s performance by improving the work connections!
Connie Glover, General Manager, Product & Market Development, BFX Furniture
Cultivate Self-Love by Seeing You
Career coaches make you feel seen. Instead of brushing away your dreams and goals, they act as a megaphone for that voice in your head, leading you to make informed decisions about your career path—whether it be finding a fulfilling job, navigating career changes, or launching a business. It’s an incredible feeling when someone provides the encouragement and direction you need to progress toward achieving your goals. With the help of career coaches, you can bridge the gap between aspiration and reality.
Mina Elias, Founder & CEO, Trivium
Inspire Individuals to Find Inner Professional Purpose
Career coaches inspire individuals to find their inner professional purpose. In doing so, they can help their clients assess which career paths, or positions within that path, would best fit their strengths.
In a way, you can think of career coaches as a type of therapist; they can provide the tools necessary to help individuals realize how they should apply their energy productively.
Bridget Reed, Co-Founder & VP of Content, The Word Counter
Frame a New Perspective
Whether it’s how to frame a bullet on a resume, how to answer an interview question using the STAR Method (Situation, Task, Action Result), or how to feel confident in an elevator pitch, a career coach helps a job seeker frame their experience.
Framing is important because it allows someone to understand their strengths, skill set, and what information applies to share versus exclude. For individuals who are pivoting their career, a career coach can also help the person frame transferable skills to best highlight background and experience to show qualification for the change in role.
Megan Dias, Career Services Coach, Parsity
Prep You for Interviews
One thing that career coaches can help job seekers with is interview preparation. Career coaches are often experts in the art of interviewing coming from extensive backgrounds in recruiting and HR. 1-on-1 mock interview training is a highly sought-after skill that career coaches possess. Career coaches will schedule a Zoom or other teleconference call, record it, and conduct a full mock interview with their clients.
The best interview training is also job specific, where the questions asked are tailored around a specific company and job description.
Kristina Ramos, Reverse Recruiter, Find My Profession
Give an Outside Perspective
A career coach, at the very least, can provide an outside perspective. Often, we are so close to things in our life that it is impossible to make the decision that might be best for us to move forward with. A career coach can provide an outside perspective that can allow you to see things totally differently.What is the best path for you? Do you have unseen talents? What career harnesses your best skills?Career coaches get a bird’s-eye view of the job market, as well as your personal path. With all of this information gained, they can decide based on what they see. With no emotions involved on their end, and being given the reins to help you make the right decisions, this perspective from a career coach can be quite valuable.
Shaun Connell, CEO, Credit Building Tips
Build Clarity and Confidence
A good and effective career coach helps a job seeker to build clarity and confidence about where they fit into the market, what skills they offer that make them competitive, and how to articulate their personal brand story, on a resume, on LinkedIn and verbally in an interview.
Navigating the job market is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is an overwhelming process that challenges our sense of self, as there is a lot of intrinsic rejection. It requires building relationships to unlock the hidden jobs market and to get recruiters working for you.
A career coach helps you to navigate the relationships you need to build, unpack landing your dream job, understand the thinking of a recruiter, and empower you to get out there and sell yourself authentically, without feeling “salesy”.
Shannon Houde, MBA, PCC, Career & Leadership Coach, Walk of Life Consulting, Ltd.
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