As Published in FACE Magazine

Whether it is your child working with his soccer coach or football coaches leading their teams through each practice and game, you are watching these trainers unlock the individual potential for each player.  Do you need someone to do the same in your professional life?  If so, a career coach may just what you need.

A career coach can help you achieve a variety of professional aspirations, including pursuing a new career, accelerating your job search, enhancing your professional skills, or even developing an effective career development plan.  To help you determine if you should pursue career coaching, we have developed a list of the various benefits of a career coach.

Career coaches will help you:

1)Gain Self-Awareness

When you first start working with a career coach, she will likely have you take a self-assessment to reveal your interests, talents, and personality.  Through this exercise, you will discover different traits about yourself that you have overlooked for many years, which may be the missing key to securing your dream career.  In addition, these assessments can also help you discover new fields and industries, or even new job positions in an industry you already enjoy.

2) Clarify Your Purpose and Goals

You can easily have years go by without exploring your potential for success.  With specialized training and experience, a career coach fosters creativity to lead you to look at yourself and your situation from a different perspective.  This new view on your professional life will help you identify various career options that are in line with your desires, abilities, and goals to develop a precise and unique vision for your career.  Career coaches are listeners who observe your talents and dreams and help you identify practical ways of achieving them.

3) Identify Your Career Path

As a neutral, third party individual, career coaches can objectively asses a difficult situation you may have in your current job or career search, giving you alternative ways of looking at the situation and guide in developing plans of action to manage the situations.  For example, she might help you create a career map or checklist of each step you need to take to ultimately reach your goal.

4) Develop New Skills

Resume writing, job searching, and interview techniques are the main tools that you need to achieve your career goals.  Career coaches know what human resource managers, staffing managers and recruiters are looking for in each of these areas, and are able to help you develop the tools necessary to portray yourself as a highly qualified candidate.

5) Build Self-Confidence

Clients often feel overwhelmed or unmotivated in their career development, but a career coach will provide each individual with the support and encouragement necessary to reach his goals.  Your self-confidence will blossom with the guidance of your career coach as she reveals what you have to offer potential employers and how to effectively communicate your value.

Just as an athletic coach would help you identify and reach your potential in a sport, a career coach will help you unlock your skills, values, and potential in your professional life, guiding you in your endeavor to enhance your performance and maximize the results of your efforts.  Therefore, if you want to take your career to the next level, a committed, career coach may be just you need to achieve your professional goal!