Career Coaching: Empowering you to Take the Next Best Step in your Career Journey
When you need career advice, where do you usually turn? Do you ask your mom to help you build your resume? Do you ask a friend to help you decide if a certain job is a good fit for you? Maybe you search the internet for interview techniques and tips.
Believe it or not, it’s likely that none of these resources actually have the quality expertise to help you achieve your career goals. To ensure that you’re making progress toward your goals, you should consider career coaching. Career coaches assist in honing your skills and developing a long-term plan so that you can take the next best step in your career journey.
What is a Career Coach
A career coach is a specialist who offers a range of services to help individuals become successful in their careers. Coaches set up regular meetings with clients to assess their struggles, refine their skills, and determine a plan of action to help them achieve their goals.
Career coaches emphasize not only strategic skills but also personal development so that clients know what they want, and believe in it. A career coach guides clients through a process of self-discovery and helps them attain measurable results.
Benefits of Career Coaching
In a world where knowledge is just a google-search away, it can be hard to see why hiring a career coach is beneficial. However, career coaching has many advantages that make it a worthwhile investment for your future.
Helps you Consider all the Options
Whether you’re locked in on a career path or you have no idea which path is right for you, career coaching can help. Career coaches can help broaden your perspective to consider a range of different options. They can introduce you to career paths you hadn’t considered before based on your interests and strengths.
Empowers you with Knowledge
When making choices about your career, it’s critical that you have sufficient background information. Sometimes, it feels impossible to have that information when you don’t yet have first-hand, professional experience. A career coach can fill in those knowledge gaps so that you can feel confident about your choices.
Helps you find Connection
The introspective, psychology-based approach of career coaching can help you to understand yourself better – your core motivations, strengths, weaknesses, etc. As you understand more about yourself, it becomes easier to know which career field you connect with, which makes for a much more fulfilling life twenty or thirty years down the road.
Helps you Achieve your Long-term Goals
Career coaches specialize in creating strategic goals. They help you identify what your long-term goal is and break that down into small, actionable steps. As you stay accountable to knocking out the short-term goals, you’ll be getting closer and closer to your long-term dream, one step at a time.
Equips you with Essential Skills
To be able to achieve your goals, you’re going to need a strong skillset. Career coaches work on sharpening your practical skills such as job searching, interviewing, writing resumes, and more. These abilities will help you stand out from the crowd and get where you want to be in your career.
What Makes a Good Career Coach?
When considering career coaching, it’s important to know what distinguishes a great career coach from the rest to make sure that you’re not wasting your time and resources.
Supports you as much as you Need
A good career coach supports you in a way that is helpful, depending on your personality and learning style. For some, this might mean regular reminders to work on short-term goals. For others, this might mean allowing more space and independence. The coach should use the amount of communication, encouragement, and discipline that helps you personally.
Has Expertise in your Target Field
When looking at career coach options, it’s vital that you find a coach with experience in your target career field so that your coaching experience is worthwhile. Your coach should know how to navigate the ups and downs of the specific career you want to pursue.
Challenges you
A good career coach pushes you to go beyond your limits. There is not much success to be found within your comfort zone. A good coach will challenge you to step outside your comfort zone and to work hard. A career coach doesn’t need to command you like a drill sergeant, but they should encourage you to push past the barriers of your own complacency to reach the success that lies beyond.
Keeps you Accountable
With the plethora of information available on the internet today, accountability is one of the main benefits that makes career coaching stand out. Accountability can make a world of difference in the results that you see from your efforts in pursuing a career, forcing you to check off your goals and speeding up your progress. A coach should be firm about holding you to your goals so that you don’t allow procrastination to hold you back.
Has Experience and Training
Career coaching is currently an unregulated industry. Anyone can call themselves a career coach without any official qualifications. A good career coach has plenty of hours of experience under their belt and, ideally, has some type of certification, which requires lengthy training and passing an examination. A few trustworthy certification organizations to keep an eye out for include the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching.
What a Career Coach is Not
One of the main problems that can occur in career coaching is when a client has unmet expectations about the role of the career coach. Career coaches offer many services, but there are also many things that they should not be expected to do for their clients.
Your Parent
Your career coach is not going to stand over you and tell you every little thing that you should do, holding your hand while you do it. A career coach exists to help motivate you, not to boss you around or to punish you when you don’t do what they say.
An Automatic Guarantee of Success
While career coaches can be incredibly helpful, they won’t fix all your problems for you while you sit back and watch. They work to equip you with the tools to work through your struggles and go after what you want. They will challenge you and assist you, but ultimately, it’s up to you to put in the work.
A Quick-fix Solution
Our world is saturated with get-rich-quick schemes and lose-10-pounds-in-a-week diet plans. We have become enamored with instant gratification. However, career coaching does not cater to this mindset and requires an investment of time for quality results. Committing 3 months to working with a career coach is a great starting point if you want to see sustainable improvement.
A Therapist
While career coaching often uses psychology-based methods, a career coach is not a therapist. Their job is not to resolve your past issues but to launch you toward a better future. The psychological aspect of career coaching allows you figure out your goals and the best method of achieving them.
When you work with a career coach, you’re investing in your future. That’s why it’s so important to find a coach that you can trust, who has experience and integrity. Do the work and put in the time – your future self will thank you for it. With each coaching session, you’re setting yourself up with the information, practical skills, and motivation you need to make your dreams a reality.
The team of career coaches at Liberty University exist to empower you as you pursue fulfillment in your career. Click here to set up an appointment and take the first step on your journey toward career success.
Written by Ashley Light 
