WHAT IS CAREER COACHING? 

The English word "career" may at first relate to "climbing the career ladder", which not necessarily everyone strives for. The term "career" is also meaning profession and its path, and therefore also applies for those people who do not necessarily aim for leadership responsibility but instead would rather expand their specialist expertise.

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Career coaching is a process support for professional changes and helps people who want to define, reflect and plan their professional (development) goals. It helps them to gain new insights and to develop individually fitting alternative courses of action.

 

Examples of typical career coaching topics: 

• Professional development

• Career planning

• Career strategy

• Career development

• Personality and occupational competence analysis

• (New) managers development

• Choice of career path

• Professional reorientation (some employers bear the career coaching expenses for departing employees through "outplacement")

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The need for support in professional (development) planning is growing

 

On average, people today go through three professional careers in their lives - and these can be quite different from each other. It is quite normal for a woman today who might have worked  as a management consultant for ten years, to then set off an industrial career with operational leadership responsibility and become engaged as a politician or investor afterwards. 

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If you start into the world of work today, you are no longer permanently set on the initially selected professional field. In the course of a professional career, one increasingly has to choose and decide on a next career step. In this process, questions arise: Further education and even daring something completely new? Which profession really fits me? What is my path? How do I want to live and work?

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Especially the last question is also being asked by the "Generation Y" with its need for a balance between work and life, who creates new forms of professional development. For example the "portfolio career" – which allows to associate a part-time job with a freelance or other job-oriented activity and / or projects within or outside the company. This enables employees to pursue other professional interests in addition to a part-time employment. Coaches themselves make a good example: many of them work part-time as freelancers and spend the rest of their time working for a company.

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For all these (and certainly many more) reasons, the demand for support through career coaching is growing - not only in the context of finding a career, but also in defining and planning one's own professional (development) goals.

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If an employer supports and bears the expense of a professionally based coaching process, this is referring to business coaching.