Who is a Career Coach: Key Skills, Responsibilities, Salary

Who is a Career Coach?
Key Job Responsibilities of Career Coach
Required Qualification/Education
What makes you qualified for this job?
Top Companies/Organizations Hiring Career Coach
Career Coach Salary Statistics

Who is a Career Coach?

A career coach is known to be an individual who has to guide and helps people in identifying their career potentials, interests, and plans. This type of coach can either work within an enterprise or in educational organizations as part of human resources. They can also work in organizational development and talent management team. Similarly, many career coaches prefer to work independently as business owners where they help students and leaders maximize their career potential.

Career coaching is a kind of profession that has a lot of potential and allows an individual to help others advance their career. Serving others in a way that you’d expect to get served can be a fulfilling career. For this purpose, you need to develop skills, earn certifications if necessary and get the required experience to become one. So that is why in this article, we are going to talk about the key responsibilities, salary statistics, demand, education, and many other things about a career coach.

Key Responsibilities of a Career Coach

A career coach has a lot of responsibilities to fulfill but we cannot say it is a one-size-fits-all job description. A career coach has a lot to cover and below we have listed down a few things you can consider. Learn about how our Free Courses can help you Learn Career Skills and advance your professional journey.

Help individuals navigate career transitions.
Provide career advice to whoever asks and is required to disclose all the available option at the time.
Help job seekers in developing job interview skills, including mock interviews.
Assist individuals set career goals including long-term professional goals.
Advise individuals in building their personal brand.
Identify new strategies to enhance career development.
Assist with career planning and explore new career options and opportunities.
Explore ways to help individuals upskill or reskill in a current job.
Examine career assessment results and offer guidance in this regard.

Required Qualification/Education

If you are planning to become a career coach then it is important for you to first earn a bachelor’s degree in areas like psychology, vocational psychology, and counseling.
With that, a master’s degree in a relevant field can lead to job opportunities with higher salaries.

Related: Best + Free Career Coaching Courses with Certificates

Recommended Courses:

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What makes you qualified for this job?

To perform well in any job role, there are some skills required and these include both hard and soft skills. Both types of skills have their value and help individuals perform well at what they do. A career coach also needs to possess some skills (hard/soft) to perform well at his job.

Desired Skills:

He needs to understand how to build rapport and relationships with individuals. Building a good relationship with the students or individuals can help both sides work efficiently.
The ability to give constructive feedback is very important. Many career coaches fail to judge students or their teams on what they want and are unable to give constructive feedback.
Similarly, a good career coach should be curious enough to understand what the team wants and how he can improve himself to urge his team to learn and develop.
The ability to stay persistent is very important. If the coach is strong enough to stay on the course, only then he will be able to guide others toward their goal.
The ability to ask effective questions is very important to possess. One wise question leads to many more and thus the chain of brainstorming starts.
Innovation is one of the important skills to possess to coach a team. A career coach should be able to find new ideas and solve problems creatively.

More desired skills:

A career coach should be an active listener and give everyone an equal chance to speak.
He should be a strong communicator.
He should have a mindset of growing continuously.
He should be committed to developing and growing.

In-Demand Certifications

International Coaching Federation (ICF) offers different coaching programs that can help an individual take his coaching career to a next level. For more details, click here.

Top Companies/Organizations Hiring Career Coach

With universities unable to keep up with the training, there are many frustrated individuals out there who are in desperate need of career coaches thereby increasing the demand for career practitioners.

Top companies like Walmart, YMCA, Noom, Orangetheory Fitness, NIKE, T-Mobile, AT&T, Amazon, and many others actively seek career coaches thereby giving this job role an opportunity to rise.

Career coaches can work in industries like retail, marketing, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and many others.

Therefore we can say coaching is a billion-dollar industry and emerged from a combination of the roots of career development. They have years of experience in job recruitment and hence can set individuals on a right track. So a career coach is considered to be a good job role.