Career Services Skills for Coaches
According to 2012 data collected from 34 countries by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average worker spends 1,765 hours—or more than 20 percent—of his or her year at work.
Given how many of your clients’ hours are spent on work and related activities, it’s little wonder that so many coaching conversations come around to topics such as identifying a meaningful career, choosing work that’s aligned with individual values and cultivating a career that ensures appropriate work/life balance.
By adding a working knowledge of the career services realm to your coaching toolbox, you can help your clients listen to their inner voices and put what they learn to meaningful use in career decision-making.
Overview of Career Services
Career guidance is not a new practice. Frank Parsons’ 1909 volume, Choosing a Vocation, is the first documented publication concerned with the topic of career choice, and is considered a foundational text for what became the career development industry. Since then, we’ve seen a growing body of research and dozens of differing opinions on how best to help individuals identify the “career piece” that fits best into the puzzle of their lives. There are a few precepts upon which we agree:
- Our career choice is one of the most important decisions we will make in our lives.
- The compatibility of our career choice plays a big role in our overall happiness and well-being.
- A poor career choice can negatively dominate our lives and lower our self-esteem.
- A systematic approach to finding that right career fit is preferable to the hit-or-miss method.
The wonderful news for coaches is that the ICF Core Competencies can be leveraged in service of a systematic, strengths-based approach to career decision-making.
Asking the Right Questions
How many times have you heard a variation on this piece of advice: “Choose a career based on your interests”?
The truth is, interests are only one facet to consider as we partner with our clients. Consider what makes up a “typical” human being.
Leverage assessments and powerful questioning to help your client uncover answers to the following queries:
Interests: What fires me up? What would I do even if I weren’t getting paid?
Abilities and aptitudes: What are the innate talents, gifts and skills I possess?
Personality factors: Which aspects of my personality impact how I relate to different environments, tasks and circumstances?
Work values: What ideals drive me? Why is this?
Leisure values: What leisure activities do I love?
Accomplishments: In what areas have I already experienced success?
Work-specific challenges: What potential roadblocks do I face? Can they be removed with accommodations, modifications and/or strategies?
Other queries to be addressed along the way include:
- Do I work best in spurts, or is my focus pattern more steady?
- Am I sensitive to environmental factors that affect focus, such as lighting, smells and sounds?
- As a child, what daydreams did I have about the type of work I would do?
- What do people around me believe I do best?
Getting to the Answer
The responses to the above questions form a strong foundation for career decision-making—and another round of questions. Once your client better understands the pieces in his own puzzle, he can explore the following questions through coaching and personal reflection:
- What jobs correlate with the combination of all of my “puzzle pieces?”
- What are the essential tasks of those jobs? How do these tasks align with my puzzle pieces? With my inner voice?
- Do at least 75 percent of the job’s essential tasks align with my strengths?
- Are there ways to offset the remaining challenges easily?
- Can I gain a better understanding of the job and its fit for me by reading more about it; discussing it with those who already do it; and/or observing it via job-shadowing, an internship or a volunteer opportunity?
- If any modifications, accommodations or strategies are needed, can they be identified? Would they be in place for ongoing support?
For your clients, the process of choosing or changing careers can be a noisy one, as they struggle to make sense of competing messages from without and within. As a coach armed with a systematic approach to career decision-making, you can help them turn down the volume, hear what their inner voice has to say and make a career decision that will yield personal and professional dividends.
Wilma Fellman
For more than 30 years Wilma, a Licensed Professional Counselor, has been a career counselor specializing in Attention Deficit Disorder, learning disabilities and other challenges. She is the author of The Other Me: Poetic Thoughts on ADD for Adults, Kids and Parents (Specialty Press/A.D.D. Warehouse, 1997) and a contributor to Understanding Women with AD/HD (Updated ed., Advantage Books, 2002). The second edition of her career development book, Finding A Career That Works For You: A Step-by-Step Guide to Choosing a Career (Specialty Press/A.D.D. Warehouse, 2006), contains a special foreword by Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute? Her newest offering is a partnership with the EDGE Foundation and Victoria Roche, PCC, in which she has developed a course in Career Services Specialty Training (CSST) for seasoned ADHD Coaches, enabling them to do the career piece with their clients.
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