The Career Coaching Toolkit

Julia Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351675598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Career Coaching Toolkit is a practical guide to 34 effective and relevant career coaching techniques to help practitioners encourage, stretch and clarify their clients' thinking. Structured around ten of the most common career dilemmas clients bring to their coaches, this book provides clear advice to coaches about when to apply the right technique to address all of these problems.

With a dual focus on theory and practice, each chapter explores the links between the coaching technique and the scientific research on which it is based. The book explains how and why the technique works, giving the reader a real appreciation of the underlying mechanismsthat make these techniques effective. Written specifically for career coaching, this deepened understanding will enhance confidence when working with clients.

A practical toolkit for practitioners and students alike, The Career Coaching Toolkit will add depth to the practice of anyone working with clients facing a career crossroads, or conducting research into occupational identities and career decision making.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Our clients are complex people and often come to us with complex stories. As career coaches, we are committed to doing our best to move them forwards and helping them to identify and meet their goals. Many of us have a number of tools and techniques that we have developed and mastered, and that add value to our clients. But sometimes it can seem as though we are not making progress and it is frustrating to feel that we are not supporting or stretching a client enough.

In the pages ahead I will be introducing a variety of tools, techniques and approaches that have been shown to be effective at resolving career dilemmas. Some you may have come across before and others you may not feel are quite suitable for you, your professional context or your clients. But I hope that there will be some that strike a chord, that you like the look of and that you come to enjoy using.

The book is structured around the most common dilemmas that our clients bring to us. I have described the techniques as career coaching tools, but my priority was to find techniques that would work and, as a result, the tools have not all been drawn from coaching. Acceptance and commitment therapy (Chapter 10), for example, is not a mainstream coaching approach, and the five ways to wellbeing (Chapter 10) isn’t really a tool at all. I make no apologies for this. If the techniques could answer our clients’ questions and if they have been shown to work I was keen to include them, regardless of the field from which they originated. Clients are multifaceted and career development is complex. If we restrict ourselves as practitioners to one perspective, we are limiting the support we can give our clients. The tools in this book therefore are drawn from a wide range of relevant disciplines.

The description of each tool is accompanied by two boxes. The first one, ‘Why it works’, links the technique with theories. This explains the underlying processes but doesn’t necessarily prove how effective the tool is. The ‘What’s the evidence?’ box highlights empirical research that aims to (and sometimes does) actually demonstrate that a technique makes a difference. An understanding of the theory is important because it enables you to understand how to use the tools and manipulate them to make sure they are effective for you and your clients in your context. It allows you to know what to hold on to and what you can lose, how to describe and explain things and how to change what you are doing to suit the occasion. The theory boxes also offer some insight into how all the different kinds of approaches, ideas and constructs tie in together and this enables you to start to build up an overall picture of psychological behaviour and career choices. Alongside an indication of whether the tool actually does what it claims to do, the evidence boxes give some idea of the clients for whom it has been shown to be effective and the contexts in which it has worked. It is worth stressing that the findings from the research should not take the place of your professional judgement, but should be one strand of evidence that feeds into it.

Each and every tool introduced in this book has an empirical evidence base. Each technique has been put into practice, its value assessed through a thoughtfully designed study, and the quality of the research has been peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the technique will work, for every career coach, and each client, but it does, perhaps, mean that the tool is worth considering. The quality of the evidence base varies from one technique to another. For some more well-established tools there are enough studies published to put into a meta-analysis, which combines the results of multiple individual studies into one statistical package and can provide very credible data. Some tools too have been widely evaluated with a range of different participants whose situations and dilemmas may be similar to those of your clients. The evidence base for other approaches, however, is less comprehensive and there may be fewer smaller studies that perhaps look at the impact the tools have on a population that differs from your typical clients.

An evidence base will never be perfect, and within a field as intricate as ours it will always be difficult to run randomised control trials that isolate the specific aspect of people’s experience that has made a difference. The research should always be interpreted with caution, and even the most robust and large-scale study should never be thought to ‘prove’ that something works, let alone to ascertain that it will work for you. But given that we want to offer the most effective service that we can, techniques that have at least some claim to offering demonstrable benefits to clients seem like a good place to start.

I have thought a lot about how much information to provide in this book. My priority is to introduce you to a range of different tools from which you can pick and choose. Inevitably, then, I can only offer an overview, but there should be enough depth to enable you to put the techniques into practice straight away. How confident you feel about trying out any particular tool will vary. You may find that some of the techniques will chime with your natural coaching style and you can incorporate them into your practice fairly easily. For those that seem a little more alien it might be useful to do some more reading, and you could look for online demonstrations or talk to practitioners who already use these techniques. For the most part, you will develop your expertise by trying things out, reflecting and trying again. If you can find a colleague (or even a willing friend or family member) to team up with then you can always practise these ideas on them first, but at some point you will just need to give it a go.

For the most part the tools have been described accurately, faithful to the original papers in which they were first introduced, although occasionally the descriptions have been slighted adapted to make the tools more suitable to a career-coaching context. It is, however, useful to remember that the specific details of how to implement the approaches are not set in stone. As professional career coaches, you are in the best position to know exactly what is going to work for you, with your clients, in your context. You might want to implement the approaches as they are outlined here in the first instance, but then you can adapt and improve them and make them your own.

One important aspect of ethical practice that might be useful to raise before you start putting the tools into practice is the issue of boundaries. The issues that our clients come to us with can encompass and influence all aspects of life. We see people who are struggling with their identity, their relationships, their health, their life purpose and their finances. The tools introduced in this book enable us as practitioners to engage with all of these aspects of our clients’ career development but we need to be mindful that these issues can be profound, deep rooted and long lasting, and we must acknowledge that sometimes our clients might need the support of a professional with more specific training and expertise. As such, it may be useful for you to give some thought to how you would respond if a conversation takes an unexpected direction and goes further than you feel comfortable with, or reveals issues that you don’t feel that you are well placed to help with.

One mechanism for coaches who feel that they need more support with their practice is supervision. Supervision is not a mainstream part of professional practice in the UK, but the more we understand about our clients’ decision-making processes, and the better and more tailored our techniques become, the more important it is that we have systems in place to ensure our continued ethical and effective practice. Supervision is an aspect of professional practice that originated in counselling, and in that professional arena it is considered vital. The purpose of supervision is to protect the client’s best interests by ensuring that the coach is performing at their best. Supervisory conversations allow a coach to reflect on their own practice and explore ideas and concerns that have come up within their practice. They provide a safe confidential space in which to reflect on professional performance and ethical issues. Supervision can take different forms. At one end of the scale, you could have a supervisor who is trained and experienced as both a career coach and a supervisor, and whom you see regularly, every six weeks or so, to discuss your professional practice. This is the gold standard, and if you are doing quite a lot of coaching and you are finding that your coaching conversations often touch on difficult issues, then this might be appropriate. An alternative is to have a looser arrangement with a supervisor, in which you meet up less frequently, or perhaps on an ad hoc basis, contacting them when you feel that it would be useful to have a conversation. Peer group supervision can work well too. You could form a group with a number of colleagues and meet regularly to discuss your experiences. The key thing here is to be aware that your coaching conversations can have an impact on you, and that this could then have an impact on your coaching, and to have a plan in place to minimise any negative effects.

The assumption for most of the techniques introduced in this book is that you will be working in a one-to-one context. A lot of career interventions are delivered in this way, but increasingly career practitioners are being asked to deliver their sessions in groups or online. Both of these additional modes of delivery bring their advantages in terms of convenience and cost, but they differ in terms of the value they can add for clients. Working in a group context can allow clients to learn from each other and derive reassurance or affirmation from seeing others in a similar position and sharing their stories. I have included some suggestions for ways that the tools can be adapted to a group context, and I do urge you to find your own ways to make them work in larger forums. I’ve tried pretty much every technique out in a group setting with my long-suffering Masters students and, as long as the instructions are clear, I have found that they can work well. Adapting the tools to an online context I think is harder. The tools in the book for the most part will really benefit from the interaction with an advisor and, in my experience, it is during this collaborative reflection that the expertise of the career practitioner comes into its own, pushing the client’s thinking and taking them further than they could get on their own. The exercises can certainly be introduced online – you could offer clear instructions and identify suitable online formats – but the challenge is to find a mechanism for the debrief that will allow the client to crystalise and capitalise on the insights gleaned from the exercises.

It has dawned on me as I have collected these techniques, tried them out and reflected on my practice, that I am not a fan of the quick fix. There are quick fixes available – well, there are exercises available that are quick to do. But, in my experience, they are rarely a substitute for some serious hard thinking and I remain a little dubious about their ability to ‘fix’ anything. The techniques introduced in this book are designed to encourage clients to spend some time digging deep and dredging up ideas, making links, reframing, creating new pathways, building bridges and designing personal futures. The exercises can start the process, but it is the conversation with you that can take the threads of the ideas and weave them into a realistic, achievable and positive future.

There are numerous different approaches to coaching that can vary, according to Eric de Haan (2008), along two continuums: from confronting to supporting, and from suggesting to exploring. The career coaching approach that underpins most of the ideas in this book is a person-centred one, which provides high levels of support from the coach and offers an emphasis on exploring rather than giving suggestions. This approach (outlined in more depth in Chapter 8) acknowledges that individuals are best-placed to solve their own problems, and assumes that they have the resources and capabilities to do so. Coaching can help them to work out what it is they want, what might be holding them back, and what they need to do to move forwards. The role of the coach is therefore a facilitative one, aiming to enable clients to work out their own opinions and identify their own best solutions.

This book will not teach you how to coach. There are other introductory handbooks you can read or courses you can take that provide a broad overview of the basics of career coaching. This book is aimed at those who are already coaching but who are looking to go beyond the basics and to enhance the value they can offer their clients. It offers a range of different techniques that can be incorporated within your career coaching practice and can help to make sure that your career conversations are more easily tailored to the particular needs of each client.

Career coaching is a privilege and a challenge. We make a difference to people’s lives and this is a responsibility that is, and that should be, taken seriously. We owe it to ourselves and to our clients to be the best coaches that we can be, and I hope that adding a few new techniques to your professional practice will enable you to add a little more value to some of your clients.

Chapter 2

Where do clients get stuck?

This chapter will explore the nature of the challenges that our clients face. The focus will be on the stumbling blocks that our clients might encounter, and the chapter offers a close look at the specific aspects of the career decision-making process that commonly cause problems. Prior to homing in on the challenges, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the research that tells us a bit about the process of career choice. An understanding of how the process works when it is working well can help us identify and explain what is going on with our clients when it is proving difficult.

How do people make career choices?

The traditional career theories that dominated the field during the 20th century held that the process of career decision making was straightforward. People simply needed to develop good self-awareness, learn about the job opportunities around them, and apply true reasoning to find the perfect match. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has gone into the field since Frank Parsons made this claim in 1909 and, whilst his model still resonates in some ways, the different elements of it are now understood and interpreted in a more complex and sophisticated way. There are myriad, diverse career theories that can help us to understand the processes. Some focus on one or other specific aspect of the process, some acknowledge the wide range of factors at play and others claim that one particular factor dominates. Looking at the theoretical landscape as a whole, there seem to be four different elements that are generally considered crucial to the process (Yates, 2016).

1 Identity. The notion that people need a good understanding of themselves has never wavered, but this is now understood as the more holistic and multi-dimensional concept of ‘identity’. Rather than the more traditional understanding of self-awareness as a combination of skills, values, personality and interests, identity is far broader. Identity incorporates past, present and future (where I come from, who I am now and who I want to be in the future), and combines a wide range of elements including lifestyle, broad questions such as life purpose and demographic factors such as sexuality, gender, race and class.

2 Understanding of the environment. Awareness of the world of work still matters, but this is now seen as a more complex set of interactions as people also need to understand how they can influence the environment around them and how the environment influences them. This includes the impact of politics, the media and one’s family, as well as the labour market and the career opportunities available and the role that chance plays in our lives. We now embrace the idea that perceptions of reality are more important than reality itself, and so how people see themselves and their perceptions of jobs are more relevant than what things are ‘actually’ like.

3 Decision making and research skills. Decision making is seen as an important aspect of the process but, in conjunction with the value placed on rational logic, we now understand that gut instinct is invariably influential and often helpful in our decisions. Alongside decision making, another skill that is increasingly important is that of research. Google provides us with all the information we could ever need at the touch of a button, but this explosion of information brings its own challenges. Finding the right information and interpreting it in such a way that it is meaningful for a particular context is a complex skill that needs to be honed.

4 Personal attributes. Finally, there is another set of factors whose influence is significant. Research has shown that we are not all equally equipped to make good career choices or all equally able to put our plans into action. Those with higher levels of confidence, resilience, optimism and the ability to set goals have a distinct advantage in their career development and, whilst we may have different levels of these skills naturally, they can be enhanced through specific tailored interventions.

These then are the four aspects of career development that are consistently highlighted in current career literature. In general, if people are clear about and comfortable with their identities, if they have a good understanding of their environment, if they are good decision makers and researchers, and if they have a strong battalion of the right personal characteristics, their path to a good career decision is likely to be fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, not many of us are so blessed. I will now turn to a brief overview of what the research community can tell us about the kinds of challenges our clients are most likely to face as they work towards finding and securing the right role for them.

Where do career decision makers get stuck?

There have been a number of analyses of career decision-making difficulties published in the last 20 years or so. One of the largest was conducted by Gati, Krausz, and Osipow in 1996. They contacted career practitioners across the globe and asked them to keep a diary for one month, recording the details of the nature of the queries or problems that their clients brought to their career sessions. Gati and his colleagues analysed the results and identified ten key questions, which they categorised within three themes: lack of readiness, lack of information and inconsistent information. Lack of readiness included lack of motivation, indecisiveness and dysfunctional myths. ...