What is Career Coaching?

Career Coaching at Balanced At Last

What is Career Coaching, Career Counseling or Career Advising?

Career counseling, Career Coaching and Career Advising are very similar.

Career coaching is a process to help unblock, remove barriers, and equip client’s with necessary tools for their professional success. A career coach employs a myriad of techniques, tools, and deliverables to help the client overcome their challenges and advance.

Career Counseling goes beyond to investigate the past professional experiences, trends, patterns that may have triggered professional unhappiness and need for change.

Career advising acts from a place of expertise and give advice on the process. Where career coaches and counselors work with you and go through the process with you.

All career coaching, career counseling, and career advising use several techniques to help their clients, the services depend on the client and their career journey. For example, an early career individual may need to learn more about what they’d like to do with their life, which employs career assessments; or they may be having a tough time securing their first job, where we’d discuss career search strategies, etc.

A mid-career individual, it may be about negotiations, leadership resume development, family-work balance, stretch assignments, networking, etc..

For an executive career individual, it may be geared more towards executive job search, networking, resume and interviewing, leadership development, business strategies, etc.

No matter where you are in your career, you’ll find greater success while working with a coach/counselor/advisor, because they’ve helped many others and are able to objectively see your approach to challenge and help you get the most out of your professional goals.

Career Development Process

Generally speaking, we all have certain influencers that guide our decision and career progressions. We share common influencers: interest, motivations, aspirations (IMAs); knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). Your decision in career and aspiration will be personalized by these factors. Some of these influencers are apparent, some are hidden, some are developing, and some you haven’t experienced yet. These will guide you in your journey.

There are numerous variations of the career development process, and this is mine: Introspection, Expansion, Strategy, Building, and Leading.

Introspection — Increase your self knowledge by assessing your core values, identifying your strengths and aspirations, and recognizing your situation. We use formal, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Strong Interest Inventory (SII) and informal self assessments to help you learn more about yourself.

Expansion — Expand your knowledge about where you can leverage your KSAs that align with your IMAs; this includes industry, functional areas, geographical location, company, culture, etc. We help you build your knowledge by asking questions, providing guidance on potential expansion areas, and find creative solutions that leverage most of your KSAs and align with your IMAs.

Strategy — A motto I’ve learned while working with our veterans: Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Before engaging in your search and career progression, make sure you build a plan that will reduce your workload and give you the best chance at success. We help you build a plan that has brought success to our clients focused on career coaching. There’s a process we discuss in coaching that allows great results, it seems counter intuitive, but it’s one of the top reasons our clients keep finding success.

Building — Building a Resume (resume writing), improving their LinkedIn profile, learning how to network efficiently, interviewing properly, and negotiating to get the best salary. The goal of this stage is to prepare you for your search, application, interviewing, and getting hired!

Leading — The previous four stages will have prepared you to get your next position. You learned about yourself, you learned about what career, industry, profession, etc. is available; you made a robust strategy and you’ve built your job success skills. Now, after you’ve worked in your position for 1–5 years, you’ll recognize and learn more about yourself. Leading occurs when you take charge of your job, position, and learn to help others. It’s about build up.

You’ve likely guessed, the career development cycle continues until you actualize in your profession. Afterwards, you’ll retire and start a different stage of life: mentorship.

What does a career coach, career counselors, and career advisors do?

Now that we’ve discussed what is career coaching, and the process of career development, let’s talk about what we (career coaches, career counselors, or career advisors) do to help you overcome challenges and take charge of your career. In short, we help you throughout the career development process, which leads to less career development frustrations.

Okay, so the list is endless and I’m not going to list everything. Here are a few packages we offer that cover a comfortable list of ways we help you:

Career Assessments — We can employ formal (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Strong Interest Inventory (SII)) or informal career assessments to learn more about your Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities and Interests, Motivations, and Aspirations.

Career-Starter Package — Resume revising, LinkedIn review, and Job Search Strategies, and Interview Prep

Mid-Level Career Package — Resume revising, LinkedIn review, and Job Search Strategies, and Interview Prep; Negotiations, Work-Life Balance, Leadership development, and counseling for burn out.

Executive Career Package — Executive resume writing, Sr. level Career Strategies, Work-Life Balance, Coaching for Leadership, Strategic Planning, LinkedIn review, Interview Prep, Negotiations, and counseling for burn out.

At Balanced At Last , you’re able to select a predefined package or tailor services to your need. Best way to learn that may be the ideal way to go, please contact us for a FREE consultation .

Frequently asked questions about Career Coaching:

How long does career coaching take to see results?

It varies per client, but the biggest indicator of time is dependent on how engaged you are with the process. Some clients reported securing interviews within 24 hours, some even reports securing an offer within 2 business days!

Ultimately, it’ll depend on your engagement. General population report taking months (5 months!) to secure a position (TopResume ), but with a detailed plan, killer resume and LinkedIn our strategies have found success for our clients.

Why do I need a career coach?

Simplest answer is with a career coach you can speed the process of professional development and success, by meeting your aspirations faster, improving your career trajectory, landing that dream job quicker, overcoming burnout so you keep doing what you love, managing work-life stress by balancing the two so you’re fully present with your family and career.

At the end of the day, career coaching helps get there (wherever “there” is for you) faster.

What is an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)?

Nearly all Fortune 500 companies use an ATS to screen candidates using machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and clustering analysis. They compare your document against the job description and provide a compatibility score for candidacy for the position. Most recruiters don’t have time to review all applications, so they may focus on the top 10% of the applicants. That leaves a lot of resumes unreviewed, until they aren’t satisfied with the top 10%. This is why it makes job search so challenging. At Balanced At Last, we use a similar ATS technology to assess our client’s documentation and provide a report indicating their performance. By using these metrics, we’re able to show progress.

What’s the difference between you and other services?

I’ve been coaching clients for 10+ years, and have worked with 2,500+ clients, 10k resumes and LinkedIn profiles reviewed, conducted countless mock interviews, and worked with individuals in early-career to CEO s.

I use analytics and AI driven software to help my clients overcome the ATS — used by nearly 98% of Fortune 500 companies (Zety ), the strategies employed by my clients have resulted in increased salary ($5,000 — $20,000), faster interview call-backs (as fast as 1–2 days), and securing jobs in record time (as reported, 2 business days!).

How much does career coaching cost?

Most of our competitors charge $100 — $300 per session, but our services start at $75 per session because we want to make our coaching services affordable. 20% of our profit is put back into developing our community by providing services to improve quality of life for community members. The biggest reason we made our rates more affordable is because we don’t want the cost to be another barrier towards your success.

Summary

Career coaching helps you develop your professional identity that follows a 5-step cycle and is continuously evolving as your IMAs change, and KSAs develop. The advantage of career coaching is we help you speed up your professional development by applying tried and tested approaches that are customized to your pace and need.

My qualifications:

I’ve been coaching clients for 10+ years, and have been a certified career counselor for nearly 7 years. My practice comes from career counseling and extends to career coaching, as I’ve helped clients from CEOs to students. I get to focus on what helps you find success and happiness that’ll extend beyond your professional identity.

Originally published at https://www.balancedatlast.com on January 2, 2021.