Why Use a Career Coach
On this page you'll find information about:
- How a Career Coach can help you
- Identify if Coaching will work for you
- Find out if you even need a coach
- How to choose a Coach that's right for you
- How you find value in their service
- Know what Milestones you should achieve
- Know what a Career Coach won't do
- The cost
- How long it should take
Competition is tough at all levels. Its not an exclusive club to only a selected few.
What can a Career Coach do for me that I can’t do myself?
A Career Coach certainly isn’t going to help you with the basics (teach you how to talk, walk and dress). You can do that yourself. Its like a running coach – they don’t teach people how to walk. So don’t be put off by thinking that seeing a Career Coach means you can’t do the basics. They are there to enhance your ability to win the job and reduce the time and frustration associated with changing jobs/careers.
Like a Sports Coach, a Career Coach will help you work on the areas that can give you an advantage over the competition. What that area is will be different for each person. Ie:
- Some people struggle with confidence in their own ability, so this is where a coach may help
- Some people struggle with their written applications, so the Coach may help them get to the interview stage
- Some people get very nervous when talking about themselves in a promoting manner
- Some have no idea what type of job they want to target
Some have no idea of how to network
Beware of a coach who doesn’t take the time to tailor an approach consistent with your background and objectives.
The bottom line is that a Coach can help in three main areas:
- Identify your personality traits, interests and goals and suggest careers which align to these. Find the job you love and you’ll never have to work another day. The best coaches are very honest and will tell you what you can and what your limitations are likely to be.
- Clarify your short and long term career goals and create a roadmap to achieve them.
- Structure your job search.
- Help target your written application/s to suit job vacancies.
- Help you to prepare and perform at Job interviews
- Teach you how to promote yourself
- Help you to negotiate the highest starting salary
- Significantly increase your chances of securing employment faster than on your own.
There should be tangible evidence of this at each step of your journey with the Coach. As soon as there isn’t, start to sniff around in case you smell a rat.
Will this work for me?
Let's say you decide not to work with a career coach. Where will that leave you? Will you get the job or promotion using your current strategy? Probably not, given the figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2010 indicating that the average time taken to find new employment was 12 weeks. This was in a buoyant job market. Its distinctly tougher right now. What does 12 weeks out of work mean to you?
Will you be kicking yourself if you didn't try everything possible to get that job? Only you can answer that question.
How do you know if you need a Coach?
You can try it yourself and when you hit “struggle town” you know its time to bring in some help. Unfortunately by taking this approach, you burn bridges of opportunities along the way.
Put your own CV/Résumé together and send it out – the message received by the employer or Hiring Manager will not be as highly valued as some of the other professional applications. But they see you might have something of value, so they invite you in for an interview. At this point they have formed an opinion of you and already graded you with the other people (ie, they have already formed a preliminary Order of Merit list). You come in for an interview without any coaching and do your best to convince them you are the person for the job. Because their initial impression of you is based on your application, convincing them you are better than that is an uphill battle. Pitching yourself to get a great starting salary is made much harder because of your initial grading. So this is where a professional application can come into play. It helps you get higher up the rankings of a preliminary Order of Merit List.
Its one thing to be a confident speaker, its another to speak in the language an employer wants to hear. Does your confidence level border on arrogance? Do you have humility? A quote from the CEO of IBM “People don’t see themselves the way others see them”. Its for this reason alone a Career Coach can provide enormous benefit by helping an individual eliminate the negative first impressions that are so hard to get around.
- We guarantee you will be better equipped to sell yourself
- We guarantee that with our CV format, you will be able to articulate to an employer exactly how you meet their requirements
- We guarantee you will be more confident at attending an interview and will have less, or no mental blanks at all
- We guarantee that with our Career Coaching your ability to negotiate a higher starting salary will be greater than if you go it alone.
How do you choose a Coach? Cost or Value for Money?
The first thing people will do is look at the price and compare prices, not value. Why, because good marketers can put a spin on anything.
Use their company Facebook feed to see the real comments people leave about their experiences. Its much harder to make people write something they don’t want to. See how may people “like” them. Ask your friends if they have had a good experience with a Career Coach. Most importantly make sure you are comfortable with the person. After all, you’ll be working closely together.
How do you put a value on a Coach’s service? Calculate your weekly wage and multiply that by six. Because as mentioned, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average time taken to find new employment is 12 weeks. This means you need to plan for this to happen to you. Our experience since 2004 is that on average we help people get into a new job in less than six weeks. This is half the average, saving you six weeks pay.
The best way to illustrate the value of a career coach is to compare them to personal trainers. Anyone can go to a gym and work out, but personal trainers can help the client achieve their fitness goal faster and with better results. Similarly, a career coach accelerates the job search process and resulting in you getting a significantly higher starting salary.
Obtaining a new job demands specific skills, such as CV/résumé and cover letter writing, networking, interviewing and negotiations. The best jobs don’t necessarily go to the most qualified, but rather, to those with the sharpest job-seeking skills. An effective career coach provides expert advice, insight and training on these skills, giving you the competitive edge to make all the difference.
The most effective job-search campaign has a strategic marketing plan and focus. No corporation would launch a new product without a marketing plan. Every phase is carefully orchestrated to maximise sales results. A career coach can help you develop an action plan designed to:
- Uncover more job leads
- Secure more interviews
- Maximize interview results
- Increase the number of job offers
- Significantly increase your salary
Check-list of Milestones in our Coaching Program:
- Know what career direction you are heading down (short and long term)
- Have a written document targeted to the employer’s needs
- Know the 7 steps to researching the job and organisation
- Have the confidence to sell yourself
- Know how to articulate the right experiences to the right employer
- How to never have another mental blank
- Know how to evaluate your Job Offer (before jumping from the frying pan into the fire)
What the career coach won’t do:
- Tell you the job you should apply for. Its your life and your future. Ultimately its your decision. The Coach should present the facts logically so you can make an informed decision.
- They wont have all the answers to get you where you want to go. Be wary of those who claim to have all the answers.
- Be with you at the real job interview,
- Write your application for you. They are there to assist you with a job application process, not to do it for you.
Cost:
The fees charged by career coaches vary greatly and you should definitely shop around for a deal. Expect to pay anything from $100 to $500 per hour for an initial two hour session. Remember that being a coach is a very popular profession and there is a great deal of competition, which plays in to your hands as the buyer. The sessions are usually paid up front for a number of hours with the coach.
The cost seems to vary based on two common factors. If its expensive, they either truly value the product they sell or have high overheads and need to charge that rate. If they are cheap, they either undervalue their service or their quality may be light on. Middle of the road, you need to evaluate them, look at their website, get feedback from their customers (Facebook is a good tool here) and feel comfortable they are right for you.
How long should you spend with a coach?
Career coaching can take anything from a one-off session to a full year program with fortnightly sessions or checkups. We tend to set people on the right track within 1-3 sessions. It generally relates to people’s teach-ability and their willingness to put in the effort to compete in today’s job market to be the one who wins, not get many close 2nds.
Use a coach if you:
- Are changing industries
- Are moving into management
- Are changing functional roles (like accounting to sales)
- Are relocation to a new area
- Have an unstable work history
- Have been working with the same company for many years
- Appear over or under qualified
- Are over 50
- Lack confidence in your salary negotiation skills
Another way to tell if you need a career coach is your lack of positive results. If you aren’t getting responses from your résumé postings or you aren’t getting called back for second interviews, a career coach could help you improve your skills and get your campaign moving forward.
Like the athlete running a race, your job search is a competitive event. Prepare to win first place in your job search. As every runner knows, second place doesn’t take home the prize.
To see how a Career Coach can help you in your specific situation, please call us on 1300 366 104 or browse our Product Catalogue.