Week 6: Understanding career coaching
Introduction
Welcome to Week 6 of the course.
Last week you focused on what mentoring could do for you – looking at how a mentor can help you to set and achieve goals, and learning how to find the right mentor. You also considered how you might become a mentor yourself.
This week, you’ll shift your perspective to look at career coaching. You’ll see how career coaching has developed over time, what it can do and why it works.
Now watch the following video to introduce the week.
Download this video clip.Video player: mc_1_week6_intro.mp4
Transcript
NARRATOR
This week, you'll shift your focus to coaching, looking at how the concept has developed over the years, starting in the 1800s, as university slang for a tutor who carries their students through exams like a coach carrying passengers, and progressing through sports coaching into the business world. You'll look at a variety of real life career coaching examples and consider some of the theories that underpin effective coaching practise, such as Kolb's theory of experiential learning, where reflecting on an experience and implementing what you've learned from it is key to making progress. There are lots of misconceptions about coaching, like isn't coaching only for senior staff, or is having a coach a bit like therapy, etc. And you'll look at some of those in more detail. A common misconception is that simply having a coach will guarantee results. Wrong-- while a coach will support and motivate, it is up to you to take action.
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By the end of this week, you will be able to:
- understand how and why career coaching has developed
- recognise the difference career coaching can make
- describe some of the theory that underpins coaching.
You’ll start with a brief summary of the history of coaching that will underpin your understanding of the approaches and processes that coaches use.