what is career coaching?

Career coaching services are a talent-centric way to engage, attract and retain top talent. These services provide an array of expert tools and resources to support career engagement and employee well-being at work. Coaching can help employees identify opportunities, assess their skills, address challenges and understand their strengths, or get guidance or insight on a particular career-related situation. 

With access to a career coach, employees get personalized workplace and career support when and where they need it. Coaching drives career confidence and employee engagement allowing employees to tap into career resources to accelerate career growth. That can mean expanding capabilities in a current role or moving into another internal position.

Career coaching is a catalyst for growth and improvement. It plays a key role in helping employers gain an edge when competing for talent. When you offer career coaching services to your workforce, you can:

• encourage meaningful careers
  Employees gain confidence, take charge of their careers and discover skill-building to improve career satisfaction. 
• build agile, productive and sustainable workforces
  Employees pursue skills that can help them perform better in their roles and pursue additional opportunities within the organization. 
• reduce long-term talent acquisition costs
  Employees future-proof their skills while helping your organization strengthen internal talent pipelines to meet future demands.

A coaching culture increases trust, collaboration and accountability. It empowers employees to become more committed to their work and better able to deliver measurable results every day. Companies with a coaching culture report higher employee productivity, greater ease with complex change and better candidate attraction. Career coaching helps you:

• build high-performing teams
  54% of high-performing companies have a strong coaching culture. This figure drops to only 29% among organizations without one. 
• retain your best people
  93% of employees feel open and receptive to new jobs, but most also want to stay with their current organizations. In fact, 88% say they would remain at a job longer if they had career development. 
• discover hidden talent
  Certified coaches can help people uncover their hidden talents and strengths. By advancing internal mobility, organizations improve opportunities to build a loyal, sustainable workforce, overcome talent scarcity and retain top talent.
• support the total talent life cycle
  Career coaching helps you take care of employees from recruitment through career transitions and retirement. The pandemic has taught us to focus on the whole person at work; career coaching helps us do that.

By offering career coaching services to your entire workforce, you promote career satisfaction, workplace well-being, and enterprise-wide transformation and skills growth that helps the entire organization thrive. This is known as “career coaching for all.”

Career coaching for all eliminates barriers and enables all employees to reap the rewards of internal mobility, skill development and enhanced workplace well-being. Traditional career coaching is typically limited to a select few — such as executives and high performers — leaving the vast majority of employees without the benefit of expert guidance.

This inclusive approach allows organizations to advance key drivers of successful business performance. This includes employee engagement; talent retention; internal mobility; professional development; and workforce diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Career coaching should focus on career wellness and embrace the full work life experience, including work relationships, communications, career growth, skilling and mapping internal progression to support critical business objectives. 

It should be employee-directed, accessible to all employees and focused on the areas of work life that are most important to each individual.

As employees focus on their careers through a personalized plan, the experience should provide a framework that enhances workforce well-being. This cohesive approach creates a forum for honest assessment and meaningful feedback — with gentle nudging to ensure accountability.

While career coaching services vary from provider to provider, the most robust programs provide a global, scalable, tech-and-touch approach. This includes:

1. one-to-one sessions with accredited coaches and learning advisors
2. a technology platform that offers 24/7 access to messages, assessments, courses and talent marketplaces
3. an employee-driven process where they choose coaches, topics they’d like to explore and when they want to meet
4. greater psychological safety because coaching is confidentially completed with external coaches

Many businesses expect line managers to coach employees, but certified external career coaches are widely considered to do the best job and deliver 100% satisfaction. A line manager may not be an effective career coach for reasons ranging from expertise to objectivity to conflicts of interest.

With a career coach, employees can get personalized guidance on how to chart a new career plan, handle difficult conversations with their manager or plan their next internal career move without bias.

External career coaches also work with employees to identify opportunities for improvement and develop strategies for change. They act as objective third parties who assure complete confidentiality, giving employees a safe space to fully benefit from the experience.

Career coaching drives positive conversations and constructive planning. It supports the development and performance of employees and the business alike. Here are some of the positive results you can expect:

Some career coaching providers offer a flexible pricing model that’s easy to implement and scale. This is unlike conventional pricing models, which often force organizations to subscribe to packages, are not fully utilized and only cater to top performers. Flexible pricing makes career coaching for all more cost-effective for the organization.

With a pay-as-you-go model you only pay for sessions used and can set parameters. That means you’re better able to control spending, meet budget demands and justify ROI. Flexible pricing allows you to start a program with a low initial investment and expand to wide employee usage over time.

93% of organizations say they would roll out career coaching to all employees if they could overcome the biggest barrier to widespread adoption: cost. But the price of resignation and rehiring is high and can be up to 200% of the departing employee’s salary. Those costs are not sustainable, regardless of your turnover rate.

Coaching-centric cultures understand how increased productivity, engagement, mobility and retention impact their bottom line. And cost-benefit analyses easily reveal the performance-boosting rewards of coaching that ultimately cut costs and generate revenue — delivering substantial coaching ROI while supporting widespread organizational health.

Check out these resources to further explore how career coaching for all works:

• Randstad RiseSmart career coaching services

• success story: $30B Fortune 100 tech giant supports employee retention

• Lighthouse Research coaching solution buyers guide

• career coaching articles