1.3 Defining career coaching

So career coaching is a collaborative conversation between the practitioner and the client or the coachee. It focuses on something to do with their career, although it doesn't always-- the focus of the conversation isn't always directly on the job or the opportunity itself. It, I think, needs to be, needs to focus on the particular issue of the client. So it's about what they want, and it is the client who defines what career success looks like or what life fulfilment is going to be. It's their choice. And I would say good career coaching is underpinned both by theory and evidence from the coaching world and from the world of careers. So unpicking some of that, and looking at how that might differ from coaching, I think the two are very similar. I think career coaching is perhaps less likely to be behavioural than coaching. So workplace executive health coaching might be focused on changing an individual's behaviour, how they can change what they do, whereas career coaching is more likely to be cognitive and to think about their thoughts and plans for the future. You might imagine that career coaching focuses on different topics from life coaching, executive coaching, but actually in practise it often doesn't. I think career is so central to people's lives that actually the kinds of conversations you have within career coaching is often very similar to those you have elsewhere. And I suppose the other difference then is going back to that idea of the theoretical underpinning, and that with career coaching, good career coaching, is grounded in understanding about career paths and how people make career decisions.