Coach. The word harks back to memories of your friend’s middle-aged dad bent over, red-faced, and shrieking directly into one of your ears for allowing the other team to score a goal in your youth soccer game.
Career coaching is nothing like that. There are no screaming matches, fits of rage, forced sprints, or even whistles (unless you pay a little extra).
Career coaching is designed to help you maximize your personal and professional potential through a process of learning, growth, and creativity. This process often includes the use of tools such as résumés, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles to achieve your goals.
Career coaches or career builders can help employees at any stage of their career, including those just getting into the workforce or looking to change their career field.
Benefits of Career Coaching to You
There are several benefits that career coaching can offer you, the individual. The first benefit is that career coaching gives you career confidence, insight, and encouragement. Career coaching helps you gain confidence by:
— Detailing what skills you offer
— Choosing what steps you need to take to achieve your career goals
— Describing what barriers you will need to overcome and how to overcome them
— Outlining how you can triumph in your current career
You gain insight through career coaching by determining how you can break into your desired career and how to succeed once you’re there. Career coaches help to encourage you to attain the job that suits you best. They keep you on your desired career path and assist in holding you accountable.
Career coaching is generally one-on-one, which makes it a highly personal learning process. Through career coaching, you can acquire the skills and tools necessary to guide you in the workplace.
Benefits of Career Coaching to Your Company
If your employer offers career coaching, it is likely because they understand that they too will benefit. The benefits of career coaching increase as more millennials enter the workplace.
In the next 10-15 years, millennials will comprise 75 percent of the workforce. A 2015 Gallup poll revealed that only three percent of millennials had experienced all six of the experiences that strongly relate to whether they felt their college experiences had prepared them well for life.
This statistic shows how ill prepared millennials can be when entering the professional world. Career coaching can fill the gap that these millennials feel. It can provide them the knowledge and skills that their degrees did not.
These skills can be necessary to improve their chances at professional success and satisfaction. Successful and satisfied employees power successful businesses. Even if a company has taught their managers to coach employees, it is not likely to prove as fruitful as private career coaching, particularly with millennials.
Many millennial workers are afraid to fail or disappoint and don’t want to feel judged by their manager. Career coaches give these employees a third-party to impart useful information that can help them work through issues and stay engaged in their job.
The Wrap
Career coaches can give employees confidence, insight, goals, and new competencies. It can give businesses, employees with completed skill and knowledge sets, and provide their workers with an outlet to solving problems and staying engaged.
Career coaching is a process that can help both you and your employer. Every coach, down to your incensed youth soccer coach, is looking for a win. Career coaching is the rare win-win.