It is National Career Development Month, and in this week's blog, we examine the valuable role of career coaching. Coaching Academy graduate, and successful career coach, Camilla De Burghe shares her insights on how a career coach supports clients when making a career change. Whether it's navigating a new industry or progressing in their career, a career coach helps their clients to make the transition smoother and more successful.
On average, we spend around 90,000 hours at work during our lifetime, with recent research showing that that nearly half of us want to change our career, but don’t know which path to take.
This is where the role of a career coach can be invaluable. A career coach will help their clients to find the clarity and direction that they are searching for in their career, and support them on their journey to making a career change happen.
1: Focusing on the ‘How’
It can feel overwhelming knowing where to begin when it comes to career change! Initially, it might be difficult for clients to decide whether they want to explore moving to a different role in their existing field, or pursue a bigger change, with additional financial, time, and well-being factors to often consider.
A career coach will firstly help their clients to build a picture of success would look like in relation to their career, including their work and lifestyle priorities, and their motivation for pursuing change in their career.
The coach and client will then work together to breakdown the exact steps to making this change happen. This is a key part of the coaching journey for the client; they now have a clear understanding of how they will move forward in their career whilst removing confusion and overwhelm that might have prevented them from taking action.
2: Values Exploration
A career coach will help their clients to understand how their current career complements or contradicts their values. This is a powerful way for clients to examine the options of pursuing a role in their existing field or moving forward in making a career change happen.
Career coaching will help clients to see the benefits of aligning their values with their career, and how this alignment will enable them to feel fulfilled and passionate about their work, even in more challenging times. Clients will also be able to use their new knowledge and insight in relation to their values to guide their decision-making process when exploring future career paths that would be well suited to them.
3: Overcoming Negative Thoughts and Beliefs
The thought of change and trying something new can trigger our negative thought chatter. Our mind can often form narratives that don’t necessarily align with our reality; this narrative might be that we ‘can’t’ change career, that we’re ‘not good enough’ to enter a different industry, or even that we’ll fail if we try something new. A career coach will help their clients to examine, challenge, and overcome negative beliefs that are holding them back from pursuing a career change.
4: Celebrating Strengths and Skills
Identifying and celebrating our amazing strengths and skills is a key part of the coaching journey. A career coach will draw out the strengths and skills that clients possess (both work and life related), to help them see how they could be applied to their new career. This may be instrumental in helping the client to see how they could become an asset for their new industry of choice, and make a change feel far less daunting.
Additionally, a career coach will help clients to identify strengths and skills that they need to successfully transition to a new career. This learning can translate into positive and practical actions to work on in-between coaching sessions.
5: Embracing Stretch and Challenge
There’s the well-known phrase - ‘Get comfortable with getting uncomfortable’. A career coach will support clients to come out of their comfort zone and embrace stretching and challenging themselves. Why is this so important in relation to career change? We can tend to stick to more comfortable choices when it comes to our career, especially if we’ve been in a particular role for a long time.
Visualisations are a powerful coaching tool that a coach can use to help a client come out of their comfort zone. A career coach might ask clients to visualise a day in their new role; including their work environment and the daily tasks that they’ll be undertaking. This helps the client to clearly see their future success, remind themselves of how great they’ll feel for achieving it and embrace taking action that previously felt challenging.
In conclusion, a career coach will help their clients to feel empowered, confident, and motivated to make their own decisions and take action when it comes to their career. Seeing clients find a career that they love and supporting them to re-ignite their sense of passion, purpose, and happiness when it comes to their work is incredibly rewarding.
Ready to specialise in career coaching? Join our Certified Career Niche Coach Training One-Day Workshop and gain the skills to help clients thrive in their career transitions. Secure your place today!
About Author:
Camilla is a Career coach with a 14-year corporate background in Urban Design. She feels passionately that every woman deserves to love their career and become a go-to expert in their role without working themselves into the ground or battling imposter syndrome. She loves working with her clients to help them cultivate calm, clarity, and confidence in their careers.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
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