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What is a Career Coach?
A career coach is someone who will help you realise your career goals or equally help you set your career goals to then realise them!
A career coach can help with identifying and exploring career options, selecting career choices, focusing and targeting job search and with helping you through the job search process.
Research shows that people who are most satisfied by their work are in careers that reflect who they really are and what they really want from life. For the majority of us though, it’s tough to find out what we really want by thinking things through on our own. And it can be tougher still to actually make big changes.
Why use a Career Coach?
For the same reason that athletes need a coach or you might get help from a personal trainer. Even the best athletes need a coach to guide them to the next level; they need someone who will listen to them, assess their situation, and push their performance to the peak of their potential.
Career Coaching is about unlocking your potential to help you succeed with your own career goals!
What do career coaches actually do?
A Career Coach will usually work one to one with you, through a series of sessions bytelephone and email or face to face or combination of all three.
Some Career Coaches will also offer the option of small group workshops, which can be extremely powerful as you have the added dimension of the benefits of the group dynamics and camaraderie from the sharing of experiences. This is a particular area of specialism for SMP Solutions with our ‘One Step Beyond’ Career Transition workshops.
Career Coaches use interactive exercises, tools and questioning, resulting in a process of self discovery and ultimately action planning to help you find the job or career you really want.
A good career coach will also help you to deal with the difficulties of what happens if you don’t change and all the reasons why you won’t be able to change! They will also help keep you focussed and provide invaluable support.
Who will benefit from career coaching?
Anyone can benefit from career coaching at any stage of their working life. Most people go through a natural process of questioning their choice of job or career as they get older and have more experience of life and there are obvious transitions and trigger points where career coaching can be of great benefit e.g:
- Moving from academia into the workplace
- ‘Post Graduate ‘blues’ / ‘itchy feet’ after your first major foray into the world of work
- Rising up the career ladder and striving to make the next level
- Impact of raising a family and changing work – life balance needs
- The ‘plateau’ effect when you feel you have achieved what you set out to but don’t know what to do next or how to move forward
- Starting up your own business and moving into self employment
- Slowing down and preparing for retirement
If you feel your existing job or career is not right for you and want to be able to focus on what happens next, you’ll benefit from working with a career coach.
What results can you expect fromcareer coaching?
Career Coaching can help you achieve some or all of thefollowing:
- Enhanced self-awareness and direction
- Clarity of career and job-search goals
- Take control of your career and life to become the ‘architect of your own future’
- Identify your passions, values, motivators, and skills
- Fulfilment from your work and improvement in your quality of life
- Overcome ‘roadblocks’ and ‘limiting beliefs’
- Accelerate your job search!
It is said that the greatest growth you can ever experience is the increased awareness of who you are. The following quote from Anthony Robbins sums this up beautifully:
“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are”
Now might just be the right time to invest in your future and enlist the help of a Career Coach to really help move your career and life forward.
Copyright SMP Solutions (2007) Career & Personal Development Consultancy
'helping you unlock your potential'
www.smp-solutions.co.uk
