The Career Coaching Handbook

Julia Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000601954
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Uniquely combining the latest research into careers with the most up-to-date coaching approaches, Julia Yates shows how to effectively apply coaching techniques to the world of career support. Demonstrating how coaching research explains practice and how practice benefits from research, The Career Coaching Handbook is accessibly written with a solid evidence-based foundation.

Presented in three parts, this new edition covers developments in theory and research and applies this knowledge to the real world, as well as introducing a few new practical approaches. Part 1, Theories of Career, looks at twenty-first century career paths, job satisfaction and career changes – both planned and unplanned. Part 2, Career Coaching Approaches, looks at coaching strategies that are applicable to career coaching in particular. Part 3, Coaching into the World of Work, covers specific real-world situations in which coaching is beneficial, from job search strategies to CV and interview coaching. Evidence and research is used throughout to demonstrate the most effective strategies for coaching.

The Career Coaching Handbook provides an essential introduction for students or practitioners who are interested in developing their own practice, finding new and improved ways to do things and understanding the theories that underpin effective career coaching practice.

Chapter 1What is career coaching and how can it help?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104827-1

What is career coaching?

There are many different sources of professional support you can call on if you are struggling to make a career choice or work out what to do next. You might find a careers adviser, a career guidance practitioner, a career counsellor, career consultant, an employability adviser, a job coach or a career coach, and when you look more closely you might see that they all claim to be qualified, knowledgeable and experienced. So what are the differences (if any) between the roles and where exactly can career coaching fit in?

The most traditional type of career support is that given by a ‘careers adviser’. Many of us have had experience of careers advice at school or college. Sometimes the careers advice at school might be given by a teacher who has no formal training but who might know the young people well and understand the processes needed to apply for university, or to find an apprenticeship. Alternatively, the careers adviser might be an independent professional, trained at post-graduate level in career guidance to offer impartial, client-centred career support.

‘Career counselling’ is a term that we often find in the literature about career practice. This is the standard term used in the United States and since so much of the research is published there, it is the term that is most widely used. We also find it in the UK, indicating a particular style of career support that might help clients to resolve internal conflicts or understand patterns of behaviour. Career ‘consultants’ by contrast have a slightly more commercial brand, and this title might be chosen by practitioners working as private practitioners although is now also widely used within university career services.

So where does career coaching fit in, and how does it distinguish itself from the myriad alternatives? These is no widely accepted definition of career coaching. Career coaches come in many shapes and forms and have different approaches, standards and philosophies. Erik de Haan (2008) describes a playing field of coaching approaches, with quadrants defined on the basis of two continuums: suggesting to exploring and confronting to supporting. Career coaches can be found in any of the four quadrants, although in general, coaching practitioners would tend to resist the suggesting/confronting quadrant. You will need to work out where you want your practice to sit. This might depend on your client group, your personal style, the organisation you work for and your experience of what actually works in practice. I hope that this book will contribute to your understanding of the evidence for which types of approaches lead to the most positive results for clients.

My professional approach, and the one I will advocate in this book, is firmly in the supporting and exploring quadrant, but with the proviso that challenging – if done from a position of unconditional positive regard – is an important component of effective and ethical career coaching.

In order to crystallise my position, here is the definition that I am working to in this book:

Career coaching is one or a series of collaborative conversations with a trained professional who operates within an ethical code. The process is grounded in evidence-based coaching approaches and career theory and aims to lead to a positive outcome for the client regarding their career decision, work and/or personal fulfilment.

(Yates, 2011)

Let me move on now to focus on three elements which, while they are not exclusive to career coaching, are perhaps more likely to be seen in career coaching conversations than in other types of career support

The first is the evidence in career coaching practice of a wide range of theoretical approaches. Perhaps because coaching is a relatively new discipline, the coaching scholars have taken an eclectic approach to theories, identifying the most relevant approaches from other disciplines. In this book I will cover cognitive behavioural coaching, adopted from cognitive behavioural therapy; motivational interviewing, developed from health therapy; appreciative inquiry, adapted from organisational development; and solution-focused coaching, whose origins are in family therapy. I will also discuss the more traditional humanistic practice that is widely seen in career guidance, careers advice and career counselling. In addition to the approaches represented in this book, there are career coaches who might adopt an existential, a psychodynamic or a transpersonal approach to their coaching practice. Of course, not all coaches will use every single one of these methods, but it is not uncommon for career coaches to have two or three preferred approaches that they can deploy when most appropriate. To my mind, it is this versatility which makes our practice much more tailored to our clients’ specific needs, and this makes us stand out from other groups of career professionals.

The second element that tends to be more widely seen in career coaching than in some of the other career professions is the use of tools. In Chapter 15, we will explore some of the more common techniques used in career coaching, such as drawing, collage, visualisations and storyboarding, but there are books and websites that can introduce you to many more, and I would also encourage you to develop or adapt your own, based on what seems to work for you and your client groups.

Finally, career coaching has a positive and solution-focused orientation. Coaching strives to inspire growth and change by focusing on the positive aspects of human nature. The starting point for coaching is that people want to develop and thrive, and it focuses on finding solutions, and what is called ‘optimal functioning’ (Grant & Cavanagh, 2007). Coaching is seen as a practice that can benefit all, not just those who are struggling, and is a mechanism to help people who are already doing well to do even better.

This positive approach in part determines the clients who choose career coaching over career counselling or other brands, and sets their expectations for their sessions. Even though the practice might not be so different, clients will to some degree self-select based on the brand: clients wanting a positive, action-orientated, future-focused interaction are more likely to choose a career coach than a career counsellor (Yates, 2011).

Definitions are useful but it is more important to know whether career coaching works. The experiences of hundreds of practitioners and thousands of clients gives us a resounding ‘yes!’, but if it is hard evidence you want, there are plenty of relevant empirical studies.

Does career coaching work, and what makes it effective?

Career coaching is a relatively new discipline. While career guidance has been producing research since 1909 and coaching since the 1960s, career coaching as an academic discipline in its own right is only just emerging. There aren’t yet all that many good quality studies or large amounts of data that relate specifically to career coaching, but there are plenty of overlaps with other disciplines, and if we piece all the evidence together, the picture is quite compelling.

Coaching leads to behavioural change

There is a substantial body of research that relates specifically to coaching which shows that it works and that it has a significant positive impact on behavioural change. Some of the most convincing evidence comes from meta-analyses, which are studies that combine the data from a wider range of smaller existing studies. Meta-analyses within coaching offer some impressive evidence that coaching has a positive impact on clients’ skills, well-being, resilience, attitudes and performance at work (e.g. Burt & Talati, 2017; Jones et al., 2016). Other large-scale studies have identified what exactly it is about coaching that makes the difference – the magic ingredients, and the theme that comes up time and again is the importance of what they call the ‘working alliance’. This is the combination of a good relationship between the coach and client, a clear and agreed goal for the sessions, and a shared understanding of the process (de Haan et al., 2016; Graßmann et al., 2020) and the evidence seems to suggest that if we can get this working alliance right, the coaching is very likely to succeed. We will revisit this in Chapter 9 when we explore humanistic coaching.

Career coaching tools work

On top of the evidence that coaching works, there is also plenty of evidence that specific approaches help with career development. I have included more examples in the chapters that follow, but just to give a flavour, there is evidence that Acceptance and commitment therapy (discussed in Chapter 13) enhances career security and career self-efficacy (Kiuru et al., 2021), that motivational interviewing (Chapter 11) increases career motivation (Klonek et al., 2016), and that solution-focused coaching (Chapter 12) decreases career indecision (Akyol & Bacanli, 2019). One interesting finding from de Haan et al.’s study (2016) is that although there isn’t very much evidence that one particular approach or tool is better than another, there is clear evidence that having a range of tools and techniques at your disposal definitely helps. It makes sense that being able to pick and choose from a variety of approaches means that you are more able to tailor your coaching to the particular needs of your client, and can switch from one to another if one style doesn’t seem to be working.

Career interventions work

There are numerous studies that demonstrate career interventions are effective. Whiston et al.’s major meta-analysis (2017) explored the impact of both one-to-one and group career interventions and gives some strong evidence that they do work. Overall Whiston and her colleagues found that career interventions result in increased career decidedness, better vocational identity (i.e. a stronger sense of who you are within the workplace), higher outcome expectations, and above all, increased confidence in your ability to make good choices. The study also showed that one-to-one support from a career practitioner is the most effective type of intervention, although noted that certain kinds of group sessions (for example those focused on identifying values and increasing career-related self-awareness) were highly effective too. Another meta-analysis (Liu et al., 2014) demonstrates that career interventions substantially raise people’s chances of getting a job.

Career coaching works

Finally, there is a small but growing body of evidence that looks specifically at career coaching. Career coaching has been shown to enhance clients’ levels of career optimism and career security through clarifying their career goals (Ebner, 2021), there is evidence career coaching has a positive impact on women’s confidence (Archer & Yates, 2017), on women’s work ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is career coaching and how can it help?
• Part I Theories of career
• Part II Career coaching approaches
• Part III Coaching into the world of work