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ARTICLE: Career Coaching, Recruiters, Etc.

Career coaching is a highly personalized service designed for individuals who want to take control of their circumstances and improve their career situations. Coaching is a process of questioning, discovering, and problem solving ... all centered around the individual's career situation and goals. Career coaching services are fee-based and paid by the individual. Since most people are underpaid and underutilized, investment in effective coaching services (unfortunately, there are ineffective ones) can offer a great payback in terms of income, happiness, and personal satisfaction.

The mission of career coaching is to improve career achievement and satisfaction through support in many areas. For a few, this means becoming more effective within their current organization. Most, however, are considering a significant change. Both cases required focused effort that starts with identification of desirable, achievable career goals. Those who seek change outside their current employers (or who are unemployed and actively seeking a new position) also benefit from coaching in the areas of personal marketing and selling strategies, resume enhancements, improved interviewing skills, and better compensation negotiating strategies. Career coaching services frequently facilitate improved results by providing a positive support structure that includes accountability and expert guidance. Better coaches understand how today's job market works and they counsel their clients to improve career change results.

Because there are many variations and specialties in the career services industry, it can be helpful to compare and contrast them:

Career coaching can be contrasted with more limited services such as career counseling or resume writing. Traditional career counseling helps career seekers match their skills, knowledge, abilities, and interests to occupational options. In some cases, formal assessment tools are used. Career counseling services are most helpful for the person who only wants to identify career options. Many counselors stop short of advising clients in the mechanics of the job market and few provide expert job search skills.

Resume writing services vary widely in cost and quality. For $69.95 on the internet you can get a $12/hour person to rewrite your resume per a cookbook recipe they have learned and it is possible that it might be an improvement. On the other end of the spectrum, executives can pay $1000 or more for an "executive resume" and upwards of $2000 - $5000 for a resume rewrite that includes snail mailings to hundreds or thousands of addressees. Many might judge this as driving a nail with a sledgehammer.

Career coaching can be contrasted with other types of coaching genres such as life (personal) coaching, executive coaching, and business coaching. Based upon the names, the differences here are pretty obvious. If the challenges to be addressed involve a person's life or business, then a life or business coach can be the right fit. If an employer is grooming an employee for succession plans or to be more effective in their senior management role, then an executive coach is probably the right genre.

Career coaching can be contrasted with a service that sometimes includes minor amounts of support similar to career coaching -- corporate outplacement. Corporate outplacement services are paid by employers for the purpose of easing employees out the door. The bulk of most outplacement programs consist of database access, resume mailings, cubicles with phones and desks, basic group training sessions, a limited amount of one on one coaching, and (for some) peer networking sessions. NOTE: A recent business trend is the entry of outplacement firms into Executive Coaching and Career Marketing.

Career coaching can be contrasted with a descendant of corporate outplacement -- career marketing services. Since outplacement firms for decades would only serve employers and not sell their services to individual career seekers, career marketing firms sprang up to fill this void. Many career marketing firms tended to sound like outplacement firms who have jobs in their back pockets, waiting for job seekers to walk in the door.

Career coaching can be contrasted with one antithesis -- independent recruiting and executive search services. Recruiters and executive search consultants are not in business to help people manage their careers or find their next jobs. They help employers find the exact octagonal purple peg desired to fit in the employer's octagonal purple hole (their job openning). Good recruiters make $100K to $300K . . . and more. They view their time as valuable and job seekers, unfortunately, tend to be a waste of their time.

Career coaching can also be contrasted with a second antithesis -- internal (HR employee) and external (1099 contract) employer recruiting services. These recruiters who work for employers as full-time employees or as contract workers tend to reconfirm the stereotype that everyone dreads -- the HR staffer who treats all job seekers with equal indifference. Internal and external employer recuiters are generally nice people, but like their independent counterparts they are very busy and bombarded by hundreds of job seeker inquiries.

Why consider professional career coaching help?

There are many reasons to consider professional career services. Here is an analogy to consider: When most people are faced with the option of taking off work for a month to paint their house versus paying a painting company to do a professional job in a few days, most people opt for the painting company. Identifying a great career match and landing a dream job is far more sophisticated and difficult than painting a house and is better handled by an experience career professional.

For many middle and high income professionals/executives in the 21st century, the do-it-yourself career planning and job search option (or working with the limited resources of an outplacement company) has become increasingly costly and frustrating. A $120K unemployed job seeker is missing a $10K paycheck (less taxes, etc) every month they spend looking for a job. A $200K employed job seeker may not be losing a lot of money, but their DIY approach is likely to delay their happiness and future opportunities for months or years. An employed job seeker who is being underpaid $3,000 a month is ... well, you get the idea.

So, what type of people seek out professional career coaches? Those who recognize the limits of their abilities and who want to make a significant positive change in their lives. They recognize college and their life experiences have not prepared them to be a top-flight career seeker. They view coaching as an investment in themselves and their future happiness. Unlike an MBA which can frequently take 10 years or more to pay back, effective career programs can offer underpaid seekers paybacks measured in months.

Why is getting career help more important in the 21st Century employment market?

One of the difficulties with "do it yourself" career searches in the 21st century is that the U.S. employment market has changed radically in the past decade and old style strategies are now far less effective. Mailing resumes, applying for jobs on the internet, etc. are known to be wasteful and ineffective. Some employers troll the internet for large numbers of applicants, making the odds of getting an interview miniscule and the odds of getting the job upwards of 1:500 or 1:1000. With average job tenures of 24-30 months (even for senior executives), more people are changing employers far more often than in the past. It is not uncommon for 40-50% of the employed population to be job hunting behind the scenes. This means there are more people than ever competing for the better jobs, even in times of low unemployment.

In addition to increased competition among candidates, employers have become more sophisticated in their interviewing and hiring techniques. They have invested in their interview methods, requiring job candidates to take their games up a notch. Many employers have trained their hiring decision makers in the art of behavioral interviewing and have added pre-hire assessments as an additional hurdle for candidates. It is not unusual to find that hiring decisions that were traditionally made after 2 or 3 rounds of interviews to now require 4 or 5 rounds of interviews. Reference checking and credit/medical/background checks have also increased. To get through the increased numbers of hoops job seekers need to become more dextrous..

No one teaches undergrads, MBA's, or other well educated job candidates how to manage their careers and job search effectively. Many are forced to rely on underfunded college career centers staffed by underpaid career counselors. Experienced executives and professionals are shuttled into outplacement firms with Class A commerical building space, computers, off the shelf databases, and underpaid career counselors who have limited or narrow corporate management experience.

Career coaching is intended to fill an educational void and provide highly important life skills. To the extent coaching programs accomplish this mission, they deliver not just a new job -- they deliver a lifetime of competitive career advantages.

Summary

Millions of individuals have already experienced the benefits of coaching. Career coaching is a narrow discipline that is frequently confused with other disciplines such as recruiting, outlplacement, counseling, and other (life, executive, etc.) coaching disciplines. There are identifiable signals in a person's career when they should consider working with a career coach or other career expert. As with any significant purchase, individuals would be well advised to do their homework before purchasing career or other coaching services.

PS:

In our company, we offer several enhancements and additions to traditional career coaching services.

(1) We rely heavily on our practical business management experience to act as subject matter expert consultants.

(2) We provide copyrighted, detailed step-by-step program reference manuals.

(3) We supplement our manual with informative books, tapes, and videos that provide supporting info from other perspectives..

(4) We believe that personal (non business) issues, self-confidence, professional image, and belief systems are important for career success. We are unique in providing our clients integrated in-house access to life/personal coaching, image consulting, and psychological counseling. These services are provided by someone other than the career coach, so that personal issues do not get entangled with the career coaching relationship.