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What a career coach is not

When looking to gain progress in their professional lives, people often turn towards the idea of hiring a career coach. A career coach is someone who can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and then help you develop your talents and skills in order for you to achieve your career goals. A career coach can prove very beneficial for people struggle with moving ahead in their professional lives because they believe there is not much they can do to improve themselves. However, people often find themselves disappointed after hiring a career coach because he/she hasn’t been able to bring about the exact results that they expected. This is mainly due to three reasons:

  1. They expect the career coach to work like a magician
  2. They are not willing to work on themselves
  3. They choose an under-qualified coach

While the second and the third reasons are equally as important, the first reason is the most common. When people hire a career coach, they have unrealistic expectations that cannot be fulfilled overnight which are what lead to their disappointment. There are multiple myths and misconceptions about the role a career coach can play in the life of a working professional which are what need to be cleared before any career coach is hired in order to ensure effective results.

A career coach is not your therapist

While many of their qualities might be the same, a therapist and a career coach are poles apart. A psychological therapist is equipped to help you deal with problems in your past to help you come to terms with your situation in the present. A career coach, on the other hand, is committed to improving your today so that you can shape your future in a better way. A coach is supposed to assist you in identifying your strengths and weaknesses and develop them further in order to turn them into opportunities for you and your career. Moreover, a career coach helps distinguish any obstacles that you might have in the way of a progressive career and develops a strategy to go about them.

Effective career coaching takes time

When hiring a career coach, it should be always kept in mind that the assistance that a career coach will provide you is long-term and comprehensive. That is, the whole process is not just a quick fix. The main task of a good career coach is to help the individual identify and evaluate their skills and talents and then develop them further in order to meet the requirements of the market. This is a long-drawn process and results cannot be achieved overnight. The candidate needs to also work on themselves and put in a great amount of effort if they are to get somewhere.

A career coach is not your mentor

A mentor is somebody that you look up to and you try to follow in their footsteps because you believe that will lead you to success. This should absolutely not be the case with your career coach. Your coach is qualified to help you in your situation but his life story and his personal struggle has nothing to do with you. Therefore, you are required to follow what strategy they have formulated for you, not them as a person. This is what will ensure success because that strategy is tailor-made for you whereas the career coach’s life is not.