Career coach: does your company need to hire one?

Career coaches, also known as career builders or career counselors, are in high demand nowadays. Helping both private individuals and businesses alike, a job coach has become a central figure to motivate personal development or career change, while assisting companies to build better connections with their employees.

What is a career coach?

A career coach is a professional who can provide significant value to your organization by identifying and solving job-related issues in a given workplace. Helping to build confidence and motivate change, a work coach assists individuals with taking the right steps to meet expectations and achieve their career goals. 

In that sense, career coaching services can be a valuable resource for both managers and employees – it can help them to respond better to situations that may have an impact on the overall business strategy, as well as the financial success of the company in the long run.

What does a career coach do?

Career coaches help individuals grow professionally, empowering them to make the right decisions when dealing with professional challenges in a short- to mid-term period. 

In a workplace environment, including a job coach in the company’s business philosophy adds value to the relationship between employers and employees. For example, career coaches can help people define realistic strategies, build stronger teams, and push everyone in the same direction. 

Companies that value professional development and high employee engagement are likely to hire a career coach as a key role in their organization. Career coaching services will help employees to increase their confidence with the help of constructive feedback on personal and professional issues affecting their work performance and productivity, among others.

How does career coaching add value to your company?

The great organizational instability caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has affected companies and workers alike. Data shows that, at the moment, employees are likely to feel motivated to make professional changes and are interested in exploring new career paths, which results in extremely high employee resignation rates.

Hiring a career coach might be a solution for companies willing to improve their employee retention. Here’s how:

One – offering your employees to consult with a career coach is a way to help your staff notice and use the growth opportunities within the company. It’s an almost surefire way to improve employee job satisfaction, lowering the possibility that your employees will start looking for those opportunities elsewhere.

Two – a career coach can help managers find ways to solve different workplace issues, including conflicts, and lead to a healthy outcome that builds more trust and confidence within the team. 

Three – career coaches can help employers improve their management techniques and communication skills, which would result in better collaboration and higher productivity for everyone.

As illustrated by these examples, at the end of the day, career coaches are beneficial to both employees and employers. By helping to remedy the issues that the employees are concerned with, they provide managers with more efficient teams.

Benefits of career coaching for employees	Career coaching benefits for employers
A career coach provides honest and constructive feedback when facing career challenges	A career coach helps to define or readjust the company’s values and strategic goals
A job coach offers one-to-one advice to understand what their superiors expect from them	A job coach helps to identify issues driving low productivity rates
Job coaching can encourage self-motivation, initiative, and positive communication among the team	Job coaching is beneficial for employers to understand how to help boosting employees’ motivation and commitment to meet the company’s goals
A work coach can help employees to leverage their skills and professional value to align with aspirations	A work coach can help employers to increase the quality of work performance and efficiency of the employees
Career coaches help them to grow professionally, identifying strengths to overcome possible issues	Career coaches provide advice to strengthen professional relationships within the company
A career coach can help to create more meaningful connections to build better trust within the team	A career coach can help to create a more friendly, happier work environment

Why and when hire a career coach?

There are a few things that signal that you should consider hiring a career coach. Here are the most important ones:

• Organizational instability caused by staff restructuring or external issues like economy crisis or social conflicts

• A struggle to find the right strategy that leads to achieving the company’s goals

• General employee demotivation due to new career challenges or lack of engagement, affecting the business performance and productivity rates

• Communication issues between employers and employees, which might put the leadership position in a vulnerable situation

• Difficulty to stand out in the market and find a unique vision that differs from the other competitors

Final words on career coaching

A company that aims to be successful needs something more than employers developing strategies and delegating tasks. It also needs to have a motivated, compatible team to execute the strategies and tasks defined.

Career coaching services performed by a professional career coach play a valuable role in helping employers and employees build relationships based on mutual trust and reliance while empowering a high-performing, loyal, and engaged workforce.

Article written by

Krista Krumina

Krista is the co-founder of Truesix Co, a content marketing and PR agency for tech companies. She’s also a freelance contributor at Business Insider and has written for outlets such as NY Observer, TNW, Sifted, Tech.eu, TimeOut, and many more. She mainly covers work life, startups, tech, and entrepreneurship.