With the new year upon us, and a great many changes afoot in terms of how the job market operates, I thought it might be wise to kick off my first post of the year by providing some clarity in terms of the many ways in which career coaches can typically enhance one’s success.
I feel these points are especially important to clarify given that most people I come across haven’t worked with a career coach before — or on a related note, gone through a corporate “outplacement” program where one’s former employer sponsors some job hunting assistance. As a result, many people don’t even know what help is possible or end up spending undue hours struggling to answer various career-related questions, themselves, without success. Additionally, despite the rise of many groundbreaking new AI tools during this past year or two, they’re certainly not magic — and in many cases (don’t get me started!) I find that they are greatly adding to the confusion around the process, versus reducing it.
So while I certainly can’t speak for all providers out there, and certain coaches might only specialize in a smaller handful of niche areas, here’s a quick top-of-my-head breakdown of the kinds of assistance most career coaching professionals stand ready to provide to professionals on the hunt:
• Help exploring potential new career options, analyzing factors that might be causing dissatisfaction, and/or “validating” that you’re in the best current path given your credentials
• Help building, editing, and/or reviewing your resume to ensure it presents your background in the most marketable possible way and is compliant with all current ATS guidelines
• Help developing cover letters and understanding the changing role such letters now play, given the rise of AI and much more limited attention span of recruiters and HR practitioners
• Help improving your LinkedIn profile to enhance the chances you’ll be found by appropriate recruiters and employers in your target areas
• Help leveraging the great many additional features of LinkedIn to drive referrals, locate relevant companies, gain exposure, and advance your job search success
• Help understanding which job boards (out of the thousands out there) will likely be most productive for your own search and how, exactly, to search them for best results
• Help creating a methodical job search routine and tracking regimen, as well as embracing the habits needed to stay focused, positive, and motivated during the inevitable ups-and-downs of the process
• Help networking effectively with your contacts and developing the scripts, strategies, and habits needed to tap into your connections effectively and generate useful help/referrals
• Help identifying the target companies that best match your interests or where you’d be most marketable based on your current experience, skills, and credentials
• Help identifying creative, non-traditional ways for turning up job opportunities beyond the typical methods everybody is using — and where the most competition exists
• Help evaluating one or more job offers you’ve received, negotiating potential counteroffers, and discussing compensation properly at each step of the application and interviewing process
• Help improving your interviewing skills, both in terms of learning how to prepare for interviews effectively as well as assistance practicing your responses via “mock interview” sessions
• Help locating recruiters and staffing agencies in your field, understanding how they work, and approaching them in the manner most likely to generate results
• Help avoiding potential job search scams and evaluating tempting potential tools properly to determine whether they’d truly be useful — or not
• Help understanding the profound way in which AI is transforming the job search process and learning how to separate “hype” from “reality” in terms of its usefulness
• Help developing/practicing an “elevator pitch” to explain the types of opportunities you’re seeking, as well as working on a positive answer on why you’re unemployed, if that’s the case
• Help evaluating new skills/training/education that would improve your marketability either for your current career path or a future one you’re considering
• Help with proactively managing your career effectively and positioning yourself for future job hunting success, even if your current job isn’t (to your knowledge) in any immediate jeopardy
In short, while this list is far from all-inclusive, it represents a quick breakdown of the ways most career coaches can add value to professionals on the hunt for a new role. While it may not seem like it up front, most people realize pretty quickly that the modern job hunting process is extremely multi-faceted and typically requires many different skill sets to achieve success, including being a talented copywriter, expert researcher, digitally savvy marketing wizard, and shrewd negotiator — in addition to being a great salesperson and “publicist” in the interview process.
As always, the key is figuring out the specific help YOU feel most need given where you’re at in the process. What aspects of the job hunting challenge are you already crystal-clear about and confident you’re pursuing correctly? Which ones still confuse or frustrate you? Where might you have some blind spots or find yourself paralyzed between the sea of different advice out there?
Matt: There’s a different kind of Career Coach that I fit into. I call this “The Startup of You.”
While some of the Career Coaching elements come into play, what we do is start from scratch looking at what this executive really wants from their life, longs for, what skills and talents they have that they may never have leveraged in their corporate job that maybe paid well but was soul sucking without the meaning they might be seeking. This means looking at ones values and how those values inform the kind of work they’d like to do and whom they want to impact with that work, what greater purpose they want in their life, and what footprints and/or legacy they want to leave. There are are tools we use to help this process evolve, experimentation in trying out new pathways, discovering new jobs/careers they may not even know existed or create one that hasn’t existed and then find an employer or a leader who needs someone juat like that. Often they might want to be an entrepreneur but are scared of the risk or they think their spouse won’t support the endeavor. By working on derisking the situation or realizing these were saboteur thoughts and, in fact, their spouse says “it’s about time you’re doing this” when they have the conversation unlocks the whole future directions. Maybe someone wants to move into the non-profit world but doesn’t know how to do so or thinks they won’t be a viable candidate? What about becoming a consultant and the uncertainty of that direction? These are all “startup of you” directions to explore with pathways to go down and evaluate before doing a resume or a LinkedIn profile. Discovering who you want to be for the next chapter is a mix of Life Coaching Executive Coaching, and Career Coaching because it has many dimensions to it. Maybe this will resonate as something someone might want to explore while they work with the outplacement work their employer is paying for to take the traveled path so they can work with a coach like me to take the far less traveled but more fufilling path they secretly want and maybe didn’t see as a possibility.
Thanks for chiming in and I totally agree, those are some additional dimensions of what certain career coaches might offer — and might overlap somewhat with the “life coaching” and “executive coaching” categories, as well. But no question about it, for some people these issues also can play a major role in their career direction and decision-making process! On a side note, this comment came in as anonymous, but from the tone of the message I’m assuming you and I likely know each other — so if my hunch is correct, email me directly, if you would, and solve the mystery! (I have a guess, but will wait for confirmation…)