Essential Career Transition Coaching Skills

Caroline Talbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135047900
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Career moves (even positive ones) can be disruptive for the individual, and the psychological impact of changing roles or careers is often underestimated. Career transition coaching is a relatively new field, but one that is highly relevant in the modern world. In Essential Career Transition Coaching Skills, Caroline Talbott explores the most effective career transition coaching techniques and explains the psychology behind them.

Looking at both self-motivated and enforced career changes, the book pays particular attention to the psychological processes experienced by the client, so that the coach can understand and anticipate their reactions and help them make the most successful career moves. It covers general skills, tools and techniques that can be applied to any career transition as well as more specific examples such as moving from management into leadership, aspiring business owners and career changers. Case studies illustrating the methods of experienced coaches and step-by-step guides to coaching techniques are also included.

Ideal for those already experienced in general coaching and looking to specialise, as well as anyone whose job requires coaching skills, such as managers and HR professionals, this timely book provides a comprehensive guide to the whole transition cycle – from choosing a career direction or change, to making a move and adapting successfully.

1
Why career transition coaching?

Peter Drucker, writer and management consultant, was right when he said that if you don't manage your future somebody else will. An essential truth but there's more to it than that.…

The working world has never been more chaotic nor presented more opportunities — for those who choose to take control. In the UK between 2001 and 2007 the fastest growing occupation for women grew by 93 percent and the fastest declining shrank by 66 percent. For men the figures were 49 percent and 39 percent (Sissons, 2011). Fifty-seven percent of 97,000 people worldwide surveyed by Kelly Services (2011a) expected to change career in the next five years. This provides a huge potential market for career transition coaches.

I was prompted to write this book when I started to look around for a resource to support career transition coaches in all the different contexts in which they work — to my amazement not one single book like this existed! Self-help books on careers abound and I found a handful of books covering some aspects of the field or a single ‘formula’ but none with the comprehensive scope of this one.

This book covers the full picture, including inspiring stories of coaches and their coachees, and provides a practical guide that can be pulled off the shelf whenever you have the opportunity to coach clients during changes in their careers.

This chapter starts by examining the transformation of ‘career’ in the twenty-first century and where and how coaches can provide support. It outlines who can benefit from using this book, the business and human case for career transition coaching and how this relates to other forms of coaching and career support. Finally it guides you through each chapter.

Context and meaning of ‘career’ in the twenty-first century

What is a career today, in the twenty-first century? Does it even exist? Daniel Priestley (2010) says there is no such thing! The world is changing faster than it ever has before, as are many people's expectations, wants and needs from their working lives. A ‘career’ can provide a whole host of benefits from the monetary to status, self-esteem, skills, knowledge, sociability, meaning and purpose. Arguably we are at a unique point in history where people's demands and aspirations have never carried so much weight in the market place and where they have never had so much influence over their working lives — if they choose and are capable of taking that power and control. Why do I believe that?

Past and present

Over the past 20 years exponential change has taken place, driven primarily by technological developments, globalization, social and demographic forces — and the pace has increased even more over the last five. Some might argue that an even more powerful force fueled economies in the decade up to 2008 — institutional and individual risk and greed; Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street proselytized that greed is good, right and works. To our cost we found that it isn't and it doesn't!

Expectations at the time of the 2008 credit crunch and consequent recession were that everything had changed. But has it? Credit is indeed much harder to come by and ‘an age of austerity’ has gripped most of the developed economies while growth continues in developing countries such as China and India, albeit at a slower pace. Growth is at best slow in the Western world and many jobs have disappeared or working hours have been reduced so that many are ‘under-employed’; and still more is to come, particularly in the public sector with the UK, Eurozone and US debt reduction programs. And yet these (perhaps?) short-term difficulties merely overlie significant longer-term drivers of change.

The forces which shaped the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are accelerating — changing the work that is available either at all or in particular locations. For instance the technology that created jobs, such as web and computer games designer, has also destroyed them (e.g. film processing, high street retailing) and has made it possible for work to be done in different ways, such as home working, off-shore call centers and through social media — increasingly work really is ‘something you do, not a place you go to’.

This has led to the development of the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge workers’. Unhelpfully there are no universally accepted definitions of these terms but, using the top three occupational groups (managers, professionals, and associate professionals) as a proxy for ‘knowledge workers’, the number in the UK increased from just under 7.9 million in 1984 to 12.5 million in 2004. It is forecast to grow to 14.2 million (45 percent) by 2014 (Brinkley, 2006, 2008).

Analyzing this continuing trend in the reshaping of the economy and work force, Paul Sissons in ‘The hourglass and the escalator: Labour market change and mobility’ (2011), found a ‘hollowing out’ of the labor market, like an ‘hourglass’; highly skilled and managerial jobs are increasing at the top and those with less skills and qualifications are being pushed down into low-skilled jobs, lower-wage service occupations or unemployment, as middle-range work (such as administrative, secretarial and process or machine operative jobs) has reduced. The recession since 2008 has continued and accelerated these trends.

Certainly the days of a ‘job for life’ are long gone in most sectors and rapidly dwindling in those pockets of the public sector where they have endured. Sissons' report for The Work Foundation urges policy-makers to ‘ensure good quality careers advice is available’ to enable workers to change jobs. He also recommends facilitation of skills transfer from public sector to private as well as re-skilling and retraining — significant opportunities for career transition coaches to support on a large scale if they work to drive such culture changes and sell the benefits of a real live coach rather than skills training alone, or a self-help book. Self-help books are widely available but working with a coach can much accelerate desired changes.

The trend toward living and working longer also has potential to increase opportunities for career transition coaches as people seek changes throughout their careers — a 2011 TUC report found that in December 2010 64.9 percent of 50 to 64 year olds were in work, compared with 56.5 percent in 1992, an increase of 8.4 percent; over the same period the percentage of those aged over 64 rose from 5.5 to 9 percent.

People are on the whole better educated, better informed and better connected; according to the OECD (2011b) fewer people are failing to complete upper secondary education and more are completing tertiary education. Between 1998 and 2009 the proportion of adults who had not completed upper secondary education dropped from 37 to 27 percent; over the same period completion of tertiary education rose from 21 to 30 percent. The long-term effects of changes to university funding and fees in the UK remain to be seen. People are better informed through easy, instant access to a wealth of information on a global scale — according to Internet World Stats, at the end of March 2011, there were 2,095,006,005 internet users (Miniwatts Marketing Group, 2001–2012).

In May 2011 Ofcom reported that in the UK 74 percent of adults had broadband access, with about 500,000 households signed up to superfast broadband with a headline speed five times higher than in 2010. Ninety percent of adults aged 35 to 44 have the internet at home compared with 25 percent in 2000; 48 percent had used social networking sites in the first three months of 2011, up from 40 percent in 2010; and 27 percent of adults and 47 percent of teenagers own a smartphone — 28 percent of adults use them to access the internet (up from 22 percent in 2010) and 57 percent to visit social networking sites. The pace of adoption is increasing with 59 percent acquiring their smart-phone in the previous year and 37 percent of adults and 60 percent of teenagers admitting they are ‘highly addicted’ to their smartphone.

In its 2012 report the World Bank highlighted how mobile technology is creating new work and business opportunities across the globe. In many countries, including the US and UK, there are more than 100 cellular subscriptions per 100 people.

Twitter reported 200 million accounts in February 2011, LinkedIn more than 120 million members in over 200 countries and territories in August 2011 and Facebook more than 750 million active users in mid-2011. Google added 10 million users to its Google + social media site in just 16 days. Increasingly these social media are used to network, find business partners, recruit employees and to look for new assignments and projects. Online job boards have become the most popular way to find work — 26 percent used them to secure their most recent job according to Kelly's 2011 Global Workforce Index (Kelly Services, 2011b).

Future trends

Increasingly we are exhorted to ‘be happy’, with the UK government introducing a national index to measure well-being. In 2010 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) set up a debate on the subject and found that among the contributing factors were job satisfaction, adequate income and wealth, work-life balance and meaning and purpose — all of which would be significantly influenced by good career choices and transitions.

On a global scale, in 2011 the OECD launched a Better Life Index across its 34 member countries as an alternative measure of success to that of Gross Domestic Product; it includes factors such as jobs, income, work-life balance and life satisfaction.

So how does this play out in the workplace? In her book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here (2011) Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and in 2008 selected by The Financial Times as ‘the business thinker most likely to make a real difference over the next decade’, argues that five forces will fundamentally change the way we work over the next 10 to 15 years — she adds ‘energy’ to those four key factors (technological developments, globalization, social and demographic forces) which have shaped and driven change in the last decade — and points to 32 key trends that are shaping the future of work. She identifies three key shifts that she believes individuals will need to make to have a rich work and personal life:

1 Gaining ‘mastery’ rather than broad, general skills

2 Building deep relationships with ‘your posse’, regenerative and ideas people (your career transition coach?)

3 Deciding whether you want a life based around money and ‘stuff’ or to do work that is productive and exciting, which you feel great about.

Similarly, Daniel Priestley (2010) argues that the way ahead is to take his five steps and, most importantly, find the ‘hidden theme’ and ‘join the dots’ to being a ‘Key Person of Influence’, a KPI, in your chosen niche. His thesis is also that we are in an ‘Ideas Economy’, that everything has changed and that ‘your best thinking of five years ago is your baggage today’.

Other business thinkers are also engaged in identifying likely trends over the coming years which will influence businesses and hence the working lives of those who are employed. Professor Gary Hamel, London Business School Visiting Professor, founder of MLab (Management Laboratory) and ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential business thinker, wrote a blog entry entitled ‘Capitalism is dead. Long live capitalism’ (2010). He argues that we are at last starting to realize that our pursuit of more and more material things is unfulfilling and unsustainable and that we want a ‘kinder, gentler sort of capitalism … that understands the difference between maximizing consumption and maximizing happiness’.

This follows from the assertion in his 2007 book The Future of Management that the increasing pace of change presents both dangers and opportunities and that success will depend on organizations' ability to adapt and adopt new principles such as resilience, innovation and employee engagement. Fortunately the best of human spirit and qualities (such as originality, grit, derring-do) are needed to create this but these are different to the qualities on which twentieth-century management was founded (e.g. economy, orderliness, reliability).

Research reported by Groysberg, Kelly and MacDonald in ‘The new path to the C-Suite’ (2011) shows that capabilities demanded of those at the top of organizations are already changing; based on job profiles developed by executive search firm Heidrik and Struggles and interviews with senior managers they found that business acumen and soft leadership skills are more important than technical and functional expertise. To succeed at executive level you must be a strong communicator, a collaborator and strategic thinker with a global mind-set and ability to offer deep insights on key business decisions.

Individual, personal factors also play a part in career choices and expectations, such as temperament and life stage, as do ‘generational differences’. These have implications both for individuals and for organizations. The Gen Up report (Penna and CIPD, 2008), whilst cautioning against ‘labelling’ people, recommends using generational difference to ‘appreciate the variety of views in the workforce’ and to address these proactively to be successful in ‘the war for talent’. They identify the four key generations as Veterans (born 1939–1947), Baby Boomers (born 1948–1963), Generation X (born 1964–1978) and Generation Y (born 1979–1991) with Generation Z (born 1992–2008) about to join the workforce. They all have different perspectives on life and work. Similarly, US research (Wray-Lake, 2011) found that recent cohorts of high school seniors value work, job security and intrinsic rewards less and increasingly value leisure time.

Whilst it is important to be aware of these generational differences, this is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why career transition coaching?
• 2 Understanding your client and career transition points
• 3 Psychological factors in career satisfaction and transition
• 4 Making career choices
• 5 Getting there
• 6 Challenging transitions
• 7 Transition into a new role or life
• 8 What it takes to be successful as a career transition coach
• 9 Final word: Vital considerations
• References
• Index