The Career Coach’s Role

It is estimated that 60 percent of people are unhappy with their work and are seeking to do something that will make them happy. Organizations are asking themselves what career services they can provide to employees that demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) and help the employees reach their career aspirations. Conversely, people are asking themselves what they can do to find success in their career if their organizations are unwilling to help them connect their skills and passions to available roles internally.

Career coaches are responsible for the following:

1. Exploring the interests, needs, and passions of individuals in order to set career goals
2. Developing research plans to help clients investigate various roles
3. Planning activities to help clients acquire needed skills for future opportunities
4. Designing branding campaigns so clients can effectively promote themselves internally and externally to the company
5. Coordinating and monitoring the effectiveness of those activities over time

Career coaches have a broad focus and many find themselves balancing three distinct roles while working with individuals—strategic, facilitative, and actionable. Increasingly, Career coaches are stepping up to provide strategic career guidance that contributes directly to a person’s entire life span. They have gone beyond being good listeners to providing long-term facilitation of decisions at the onset of career planning, and helping their clients take the necessary actions to achieve goals.

Strategic

Administering and interpreting assessments and inventories to assess work values, interests, skills, and competenciesThe strategic role of career development requires a global and forward-thinking focus. Career coaches have the opportunity to help clients create careers that they are passionate about and to find the right culture in which they can perform work. Career coaches should establish key business partnerships with HR departments, senior management, and managers to ensure that employee development meets business objectives. Career development activities that are strategic in nature include:

• Identifying alternative internal career options for people in transition that capitalize on individual knowledge, skill, and ability profiles
• Developing specific career paths with experience, knowledge, abilities, and skills defined
• Helping overcome issues such as lack of self-confidence, poor self-discipline, and fear of success/failure
• Creating career development plans to help employees grow and learn
• Maximizing person-job-organizational fit and helping kick-start a stagnant career
• Exploring and preparing employees for internal job searches, including résumé preparation, in-house interviewing, and networking
• Identifying and cultivating internal-mentor and career advisor networks for personal career development
• Providing unbiased, objective career intervention/mediation/facilitation for people experiencing job stress, job loss, or transition during corporate reorganizations, mergers, or downsizing
• Teaching internal career advisors and mentors how to be more effective in guiding employee career development
• Facilitating employee training and development initiatives
• Managing outplacement strategies during times of transition

Facilitative

The facilitative role of career development involves the day-to-day activities that are focused on managing clients. A variety of tasks, including motivating the client to do homework, following up on client assignments, and communicating with potential informational interviewers are associated with day-to-day management. Career development activities that are facilitative in nature include (Stearns n.d.):

• Releasing and encouraging the client’s powers of “career imagination”
• Allowing clients to employ their emotions as well as their intellects in the career exploration process
• Awakening or nurturing the client’s spirit of self reliance, and relating this to support provided by others
• Presenting “career” as a concept that encompasses ALL work, paid or unpaid
• Providing unconditional positive regard to the client so that he or she can feel comfortable accepting wherever he or she is on the career exploration continuum
• Increasing the client’s awareness and understanding of the world of work
• Examining the purposes of one’s work beyond personal gains
• Maximizing career satisfaction

Actionable

The actionable role of career development focuses on specific steps that the Career coach must perform in order to help the client achieve his or her goal. These steps include record keeping and a host of administrative duties to move the client through the process. Career development activities that are actionable in nature include:

• Identifying viable work
• Learning how to change careers
• Searching for a sense of identity and direction
• Achieving new skills and competencies
• Dealing with dual career issues
• Understanding the world of work
• Making over a résumé or designing an interview
• Seeking work/life balance
• Improving performance on the job