Reimagine Your Future: How Career Coaching Will Guide Your Career Path

If you’re a professional looking to accelerate your career trajectory, land a new internal or external role, or get off to a strong and fast start in a new position, consider career coaching. During International Coaching Week (ICW), reimagine your future and learn how career coaching can guide your career path.

Start by asking yourself the following questions:

  • Do you feel stuck in your career path and lack a plan for moving forward?

  • Do you need objective support in developing your career plan?

  • Do you struggle to craft and convey your value proposition?

  • Are you thinking about a significant professional change, but don’t want to involve your current manager?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, career coaching makes sense for you at this point in your professional life.

Career coaching helps professionals develop a comprehensive strategy and take specific actions to gain momentum, grow and advance in their careers. A career coach partners with clients to identify roles that align with the client’s top strengths and values, then develop a plan for pursuing them. A career coach also provides “practical and tactical” support for job seekers around resumes and LinkedIn profiles, job interview preparation, and overall job search strategy.

Advance Your Career Track

Career coaching can accelerate your career progress and help you uncover new paths for achieving your professional goals.

Career coaching advances your career track by:

  • Uncovering where your true passion lies and building a plan to support you in pursuing it confidently and fearlessly.

  • Utilizing assessments and other tools to increase awareness and identify behaviors and beliefs that might be limiting your career progress.

  • Helping shift your mindset to take ownership and accountability for your career journey and career planning.

Partner with a Career Coach

It’s common for professionals to feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed when making a career transition. An effective career coach helps clients manage stress and identify and resolve issues around resistance, obstacles to progress, and follow-through on commitments. Working with a career coach gives you a partner who supports you and your agenda. A career coach holds you accountable for the decisions you make and actions you commit to take. Finally, a career coach will raise awareness of any inner blocks or beliefs that are holding you back and helps you build strategies to overcome them.

Similar to selecting the right executive or leadership coach, partner with a career coach that you feel comfortable with from the start.

Here are attributes to look for when choosing a career coach:

  • Outstanding listener: Has the ability to capture and reflect both on what’s said and what goes unspoken.

  • Straight-talker: Uncovers and helps you tackle points of resistance or anchors to past performances that inhibit progress.

  • Multidimensional approach to coaching: Combines assessments and data with behavioral observations to identify where and how you may overplay your strengths and derail your performance. 

  • Action-oriented, process-focused and dedicated to the client’s agenda: Brings a plan with clear deliverables and outcomes to the engagement and has the flexibility to adapt the program to give clients what they need most in the moment.

Guide Your Future Career Path

A robust career coaching program should encompass both “inner” and “outer” work to deliver the most value and guide your future career path.

Inner work identifies and brings awareness to:

  • Core, must-have values and motivators and ensuring they align with corporate culture.

  • Day-to-day behavioral strengths (e.g., resilience, drive for results, inquisitiveness and fit with the job)

  • Strengths that are overplayed under stress and can derail performance or limit job fit.

  • Personal success factors that influence the ability to excel.

Inner work culminates in developing a compelling and deeply personal value proposition. It captures the internal and external motivators for performing at your best, the types of problems you like to solve, and the unique talents you possess for doing so.

Completing the inner work and having a clear value proposition creates powerful momentum for the outer work, which consists of:

  • Building a powerful resume and LinkedIn profile that conveys accomplishments and impacts.

  • Tailoring a job search and networking strategy to target roles, key decision makers, and hiring managers.

  • Mastering storytelling, along with building confidence and fearlessness for top performance in interviews.

  • Developing a transition plan to get off to a strong start in a new role.

Discover How Career Coaching Got Results

Another aspect of ICW is to celebrate the power and impact of professional coaching. In doing so, I’m happy to share the positive impact career coaching has had on my clients.

For me, the most rewarding and satisfying moments in working with my clients occur when I:

  • See their “a-ha” moments as they gain self and situational awareness.

  • Observe when they have a breakthrough and watch as they realize that old rules or limits that constrained them no longer apply.

  • Celebrate and champion their successes.

  • Hear them describe how their increased resilience and confidence sustained them through their job search.

Here are examples of career coaching success stories:

Controller for Non-Profit Agency

This Leading Edge Coaching & Consulting (LECC) client was at the same organization for 15 years and wanted to transition back to the commercial sector. However, he lacked the confidence to present himself powerfully and purposefully. He couldn’t articulate his value proposition and was challenged to answer questions about himself. Also, he didn’t make his experience relevant on his resume and LinkedIn profile.

We explored what behaviors made him successful as an accounting professional. They encompassed the ability to stay cool under pressure, his problem-solving skills and the overall value of his experience. By reminding him of his past successes, he was able to speak more confidently about his performance and what made him unique. This was a game-changer for him in interviewing, which led to him landing a senior accounting director position at a mid-sized tech company.

Education and Philanthropy Executive

This client was looking for career direction, to clarify her personal mission and align her professional path with her calling. While she struggled for years doing this on her own, LECC helped her unravel a “cat’s cradle” of competing thoughts and feelings. Coaching shifted her from being “stuck” to creating a vision of equally plausible scenarios for her next career move.

Take the Next Step

Navigating the job market and your career journey can be difficult. It takes much more than dusting off your resume or crafting the perfect cover letter or thank-you note. Having a trusted partner alongside you can reduce the complexity of your internal or external job search. A career coach will advocate for you, challenge you when appropriate, hold you accountable, and support your growth and development without judgment.

Are you interested in learning more about how 4D Career Transition Coaching from Leading Edge can support you? Book a complimentary discovery call today.