What makes a successful career coach?
The answer, depending on how long you’ve got, can be summarised in a line, a paragraph, or a book.
Career coaching is one of those callings that can be riveting and mystifying in equal measure. It can be a demanding profession, requiring one to be committed, intuitive, and adaptable to keep up with changing times while consuming truckloads of information. If you’re keen on taking the plunge and becoming an ace career coach, it helps to ensure a few key details. Whether you are new to career counselling or have been guiding students for some time, we have some tips for you.
4 Tips From the Pros to Help You Become a Successful Career Coach
1. Let Your Credentials Underscore Your Expertise
Seasoned career coaches agree that coaching credentials go a long way in establishing your brand and reputation as a top career coach. While your coaching flair, interpersonal skills, and rapport-building nous will always be paramount, potential clients who haven’t encountered these will be drawn to your credentials as a career coach.
What sort of training did you undergo to become a career coach? Did it help you develop a 360-degree perspective of career streams nationally and internationally? Are your credentials globally recognised?
Mindler’s 3-level ICCC Program, for instance, gives prospective career coaches a stepwise progression into the world of career counselling, helping them gain more expertise with each step. It also helps that the ICCC Credentialing Bodies are the renowned NCDA (USA) and CDA (USA). When your coaching skills are globally validated, more clients can entrust you with guiding them to their best-fit careers.
2. Guide Students to Their True North by Asking the Right Questions
“The love for learning is often present in students, but they don’t often know that it is.”
Wesley Wade, LCMHC, LCAS, a career counsellor at North Carolina State University, offers a unique insight into student psychology and how to help students identify what sort of career they would thrive in. Career coaches frequently encounter students in search of a calling: students who may be good at academics, extra-curriculars, or both, but cannot envision making a career out of their interests. Helping these students visualize their finish line is what marks a successful career coach.
Wade says, “We ask students the wrong question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I’m 38 years old, I don’t know what I want to be! It’s about understanding what a student wants from life, a career that fulfills their passions or a career that funds their passions?”
He recommends approaching the question from a variety of different angles. For instance, asking a student what kind of lifestyle they would enjoy, or perhaps the places they would like to travel to would begin a journey of crystallizing the sort of career that would let them achieve these goals. Is a student naturally extroverted? Or do they prefer to be on their own and work on a project in solitude? Questions like these are much easier to answer and help immensely in building a rapport with the student. Creativity, flexibility, and adopting an individualized approach for each student will help career coaches make inroads into understanding them.
3. Delegate Tasks to Technology Wherever Possible
Ever seen one of those streetside acts where a performer rides a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling an increasing number of objects?
The modern-day career coach will have days when they feel exactly like that; what with student details to track, university and examination updates to stay abreast with, making their brand visible amid a glut of competitors, and staying up-to-date with new and disruptive careers. The solution to staying on top of these challenges is by relying on state-of-the-art technology.
Software as a service or SaaS portals like the Mindler Partner Platform are practically the Alfred to a career coach’s Bruce Wayne, as they hugely simplify day-to-day operations. Mindler’s Partner Platform, for instance, offers features like a centralized Dashboard to survey student details, marketing collaterals to help in brand building, virtual career simulators, and a comprehensive Career Library for information related to more than 1000 career domains.
This allows a career coach to wholeheartedly focus on what’s truly important – building a connection with their client and beginning a journey into discovering what career would fulfill them.
4. Recognise That Clients Will Often Present With Long-Held Beliefs That Do Not Reflect What They Truly Want
“Most people do not take the time to figure out who they are, before deciding what they want to be.”
Sharon Belden Castonguay, an adult developmental psychologist, and career counsellor postulate in her Ted Talk that most career choices are unconscious decisions heavily influenced by culture and surroundings. She goes on to note that human beings are not as rational as they believe themselves to be, holding deep-seated opinions about careers that may have originated from parents, peers, or the community they are part of. This contributes to making poor career choices that they regret later in life.
To be a successful career coach, then, one must help clients develop self-awareness that is free of unconscious influences.
One of the surest ways to eliminate biases from such background factors is by relying on a highly reliable and valid psychometric assessment. The objectivity and impersonal nature of a psychometric assessment helps both career coach and client sift through superfluous notions to reach a true understanding of the client’s career goals and needs. This translates to much greater career satisfaction, as well as better self-knowledge for career-related choices in the future.
Conclusion
Many elements go into the making of a successful career coach. On the one hand, intangible elements such as personality, gelling with clients, and diligence play a huge role and must be fastidiously nurtured. On the other, practical elements such as training programs, credentials, and software platforms should ideally be opted for to add credibility to your enterprise and make operations easier on a day to day basis.
If you are interested in becoming a career coach, follow this link to learn more about Mindler’s International Certified Career Coach program.
