5 Important Reasons You Should be Hiring a Career Coach

Make Strong Career Decisions | 5 things to consider | P.S. Your Career

 Coach Mike S. discusses why a career coach can be an extremely valuable tool when making a career change.

 

 

Introduction: It’s that perennial tradeoff that happens every time an appliance breaks; you plan a complicated vacation itinerary; your car makes a strange noise; you consider the joy of doing your taxes; or your computer pops up a strange error message – do I try to do this myself, or do I hire a professional to help me do it? There is no right or wrong answer to this question, but that doesn’t make the decision any easier.

While the examples above are for your non-work life, planning and managing your career isn’t all that different. There are a few considerations that can help you evaluate whether the ‘go-it-alone’ approach or engaging a career expert is the best for you.

How about your situation? Your career is more important and likely more complex than the disposal in your sink, so what are some factors unique to engaging career experts that can help you make an informed decision?

 

Experience: career coaches often have decades of experience, both in industry themselves and subsequently offering their coaching services to others. Many have worked with clients across industries, career stages, and employment situations. Hiring a career coach can give you the benefit of all that experience in a much faster and easier way than were you to have to acquire it yourself.

 

Objectivity: career coaches are independent of your career, company, and personal situation. This removes potential bias from their advice to you. For example, a company may have a leadership development program to help you improve your leadership skills, and this may be necessary for progression to more senior roles at the company. However, those skills, while transferable, are designed to enable you to work as an effective manager in that company’s management system, and not necessarily designed to help you achieve your career goals.

 

Perspective: career coaches in many cases have dealt with hundreds of clients or more, and have the perspective on market trends, career choices, and interview strategies that few others have. If you want to know how to negotiate a compensation package, wouldn’t the thoughts of someone who’s done it over and over be valuable to you?

 

Capacity: making career moves is hard even at the best of times, but with the advent of job search aids such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, you’d think that all this was getting easier. In reality, the competition for good roles is getting tougher, and the expectation is that you are engaged in both in-person networking and having a strong online presence. A career coach can objectively help you determine how to market yourself and what will make you competitive, as well as providing expertise on where to invest your efforts. All of that is not to mention the time it will take you to do these things well. Time that, if you’re still working in your current role, is most likely in very short supply.

Return on Investment: While hiring a career coach does have a cost, if your resulting salary increase will pay for that cost in six months, and then continue to pay you more for the life of that role, that starts to look like a very smart investment. Outside of salary increase, many clients find that making a well-thought out decision is the best return of all, because they are more likely to land a job they really want rather than settling for what is most available to them.

As you can see, the factors that might influence your decision around engaging expertise for career-related decisions is not a simple one, and is not the right choice for everyone – but for many of us there are compelling reasons for choosing to engage outside help at pivotal moments in your career.