What Exactly Does a Career Coach Do? (And Do You Need One)

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For many, the career journey feels winding and unpredictable. I know for me it’s felt that way at times. Your career can go through ups, downs, and plateaus.

This is why people decide to work with career coaches—to help them find direction, momentum, and progress in their careers.

In this post, I’ll share with you what a career coach does, who would benefit most from working with one, and what it’s actually like to work with a career coach. 

What Does a Career Coach Do?

The ultimate goal of career coaching is to help a professional get a job, keep a job, and advance in their career.

Working with career coaches will likely feel empowering and help you become a bigger version of yourself. Plus, the knowledge that you have someone in your corner can give you a feeling of psychological strength.

But working with a career coach should do more than just make you feel good; after working with a career coach, you should see tangible improvement in your career—whether that’s your salary, your job status, your title, or your exit from an unfulfilling role.

We’ll go into more detail later in this post, but here are some of the things a career coach might help you with:

• Clarifying what you really want out of your career

• Setting and achieving career goals

• Helping you with résumés and cover letters to get more interviews

• Becoming an expert at interviews

• Thriving in the first 90 days of a new job

• Negotiating job offers, raises, and promotions

• Developing leadership skills

• Building your personal brand

• Learning to network more effectively

And if you’re reading this and thinking about becoming a career coach, check out this article on how to become a career coach.

How to Know If You Need a Career Coach

Career coaches will benefit different people at different times in their careers. Usually, a clear sign that you might benefit from a career coach is if your career is causing you consistent angst, anxiety, frustration, or hopelessness.

Below are some of the most common situations that might give rise to these feelings. Scan through the list below; if any of them feel like they are written about you, this may suggest that you could benefit from the support of a career coach.

You feel successful but unfulfilled

Some people’s ambition drove them to the top of the career ladder. But once they got there, they realized that their successful career felt emptier than they expected. 

Maybe their ladder was propped up on the wrong building and they were focusing on the wrong priorities.

If this is you, a career coach can help you clarify what you really care about, determine what type of career would truly bring you joy, and develop a plan to pivot in that direction.

You feel stuck, lost, or purposeless in your career

Some folks feel deeply unsatisfied with their current work. They may go to bed each night with thoughts like, “There has to be more to my career (and life) than this,” yet they feel uncertain about what changes to make.

Over half of Americans think about how they can experience more purpose in their life on at least a monthly basis. A sense of purpose is a human need, and if you’re not getting it, it can be extremely painful.

If you feel bored at work, like there is no room for career growth in your role, or like you’re just wasting your time away, a career coach can help you shift gears to find work that feels meaningful.

You feel anxious about your level of achievement

You know you have a lot of potential. You trust that you have talents and gifts. But if someone looked at your career, they wouldn’t know.

You feel like you just can’t move forward in your career, no matter how hard you try.

When you grow old and look back at your life, you want to feel proud of the career you created. But right now, you just don’t know how to achieve the type of success you long for.

If this is you, a career coach could be your secret weapon to getting out of your own way and finally making some progress in your career.

You feel constantly burnt out and need to re-align your work-life balance

Alarm clock sounds. How could it possibly be time to wake up already? 

Exhausted, you drag yourself to your job. At work, your energy feels low, and your light feels dim. You numb yourself to these feelings to push through the day. 

Your work day ends and you get home exhausted. All you can manage to do is switch on Netflix and order takeout to soothe yourself. Then you go to bed, only to start this same godforsaken cycle all over again tomorrow.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, then you might be teetering on the edge of burnout (and you’re in good company, alongside 52% of workers).

If you feel drained from work. Or if you feel like you have no life outside of work, then a career coach can help you clarify your needs, envision the life you actually want for yourself, and take the bold steps to create it.

You feel undervalued or underappreciated in your current role

Maybe you’re not paid enough, or you feel like management never notices how much you contribute. You know you can do more, earn more, and take on more. But it seems like you’re sitting stagnant and not taken seriously. 

Studies even suggest that it’s far harder to feel engaged at work when you feel underappreciated.

This is ripe terrain for a career coach. They can help you see your strengths more clearly, advocate for yourself, negotiate promotions and raises, and sell your accomplishments during performance reviews. All to get the role, salary, and recognition you deserve.

You feel intimidated about changing career paths

Perhaps you’ve realized that it’s time to switch it up. You want to jump into an entirely new career direction. That’s exciting!

But starting over can also be daunting.

If you’ve recognized that you want to start anew, but feel overwhelmed on how to do that, then you might benefit from a coach in your corner to make your career transition smoother and more successful.

You feel discouraged because you aren’t getting interviews  

The job search process can be difficult. Sometimes, it can feel downright demoralizing, like you’re firing applications into the void each week.

If you aren’t getting interviews, luckily, there are things you can do to increase your success rate.

This is a perfect situation for a career coach. Not only can they give you a morale boost, but they can also teach you how to improve your dossier so recruiters want nothing more than to get you onto a Zoom call.

You feel frustrated because you keep flubbing your interviews

Equally frustrating is if you are getting interviews, but you feel like you keep botching them.

This might be because you feel extremely nervous in interviews, maybe even paralyzed, so you don’t bring your best self. Or maybe you feel comfortable enough, but just don’t know the tricks of the trade on how to present yourself effectively. 

Either way, a career coach knows exactly how to ace an interview and can help you practice with mock interviews so that the next time you meet your interviewer, you feel at home like Beyonce stepping on stage. 

How a Career Coach Can Help You Succeed

If you resonated with any of the scenarios above, then you might be a good fit to seek out a career coach. Here are the primary ways that career coaches support their clients’ career growth.

Help you clarify your dream job 

For many clients, work with a career coach starts with some deep contemplation about what they really want their career to look like.  

To help you find a north star for your career, the coach will ask powerful questions and use frameworks to help you find clarity. This will likely include tactfully mining your past job experiences for patterns around what you liked and didn’t like.

Once you have a grasp on what you want your work to look and feel like, the coach can map that onto their mental Rolodex of all the job options out there. They may help you think of career options that match your professional interests that you didn’t even know existed. 

Set and achieve professional goals

Knowing your dream job is a great start, but it’s not enough on its own. A coach will help you create a career roadmap and actionable steps to move you in the right direction. 

For example, if you realize your dream job is becoming a nonprofit executive, then it might involve first finding a job in fundraising, or building skills in grant writing and volunteer management.

In other cases, goals may have to do with getting promotions, working fewer hours, or expanding your professional network.

Coaches can also provide accountability, which studies suggest can help you more effectively pursue, stick with, and achieve your goals.  

Create winning dossiers to get more interviews

One of the most common reasons to seek out a career coach is to get a better job. This is a place where a career coach can really shine because the reality is that finding a job is an art form. 

There’s a lot that goes into it, but the baseline skill is how to create a stellar dossier.

That means how to customize a résumé for each application that gets you noticed and how to write cover letters that stand out. 

Career coaches help with this whole process, both with big-picture ideas and with the minutia. They can literally help you pick the right fonts and restructure the sentences on your résumé.

The end result here will be landing way more interviews when you put out job applications.

Shine in interviews to get job offers

Just getting invited to an interview isn’t enough—you also have to win over your interviewers.

The most common reason that people feel nervous about interviews is that they won’t be able to answer a difficult question.

Fortunately, career coaches know what you’re going to get asked. They can help you craft your responses so you’ll have an answer ready for whatever comes your way. This might mean fashioning your response to “tell me about yourself” in a captivating way or speaking skillfully about your weakness.

Not to mention career coaches can actually practice interviewing you in real time and even record you. That way, you get to practice with a real person, you get feedback on your responses, and you can watch your recordings to find further room for improvement.

In short, a career coach can take your interviewing skills from meh to mind-blowing.

Wow your boss on your first 90 days of a job

Did you know there are specific ways to start a new job so that you impress your boss beyond measure?

A career coach can help you strategize how to do just that; so that after you start a new job, your manager feels like they got extremely lucky signing you onto their team.

This way you don’t just land a new job, but you get on the fast track to further climb the ranks.

Negotiate job offers, raises, and promotions

So many of us never learned how to negotiate. Or feel terrified that if we ask for more, we’ll offend the other party.

Fortunately, career coaches are trained negotiators and can help you with your skill set.

If you just got a job offer, they can help you clarify what to ask for and exactly how to do it.

And if you feel you’re due for a raise or promotion, they can give you tips on how to nail that conversation.

Not to mention, they actually conduct practice negotiation sessions with you so that when you go into the real conversation, you’ll be so prepared that you’ll feel like you could be a judge on Shark Tank.

Build leadership skills

Did you know that through deliberate practice and training, you can become a better leader?

Whether you are a newly minted manager or a seasoned exec, career coaches can help you train your skillset.

This typically comes down to improving your communication skills and executive presence.

Communication training often includes learning to share your vision in an inspiring way, bring out the best in your team, or give feedback in a way that lands.

Executive presence refers to your ability to project confidence and authority as a leader. I recently worked with a client who wanted to redefine (or “rebrand”) her professional image for a new role, and I helped her do just that—cultivate the presence of a respected leader.

Build your personal brand

We are amidst the era of content, where everyone seems to be a creator or influencer to some degree. And while it’s not necessary to have a personal brand, having an impressive online presence can certainly help you attract more opportunities.

A coach can help you clarify your online voice and aesthetic. Plus they can help you optimize your LinkedIn profile so recruiters are drawn to you like kids to candy.

Learn to network

If you have a large, healthy network, it will give you endless career advantages.

Most of us weren’t taught how to network. So unless it comes to you intuitively, or you’ve studied it, it can help to learn tactics on how to expand your network and how to use your network to find opportunities.

A career coach can give you a strategy for how to build up your network, and hold you accountable to following through. Plus they may have relevant contacts they can introduce you to.

What Happens in a Session With a Career Coach

Usually, career coaches work with clients in packages that last several months. So, your work with a coach will go through an arc. 

The first few career coaching sessions will likely be clarifying what exactly it is you want for your career—IE finding your north star. And the rest of the time will probably be spent on practical support getting there. 

What happens in a session with a career coach very much depends on your specific goals, however below are a few activities you could likely expect in a session.

• Talking about what you really want. The coach may ask powerful questions like “What are you doing when you lose all track of time?” They’ll likely also comb through your career history with you and seek patterns of what lit you up and what brought you down.

• Goal setting. It’s not enough to know what you want, you need to pursue it. Coaches will help you create clear goals, and will hold you accountable to following a step-by-step action plan to get to where you want to go.

• Evaluating your strengths and weaknesses. The coach might take you through strengths assessments to help clarify your career superpowers and gain understanding of your weakspots.

• Learning job search tactics. If you’re struggling to find the jobs you want, a career coach can show you the tools and tactics for finding job opportunities that excite you.

• Upleveling your dossier. Expect your coach to give you detailed feedback on your résumés, cover letters, and LinkedIn profile.

• Interview practice. If you have interviews coming up, your coach can help you prepare for the right questions. They’ll help you craft compelling answers and actually practice doing interviews with you.

• Learning networking skills. Your coach can teach you strategies on how to grow your network and leverage it. Plus, they might be able to introduce you to some of their contacts.

• Negotiation advice and practice. If you landed a job and want to ask for more pay or better perks, or if you’re seeking a raise or promotion, a career coach can help you clarify what to ask for and actually help you practice negotiation conversations.

• Honest feedback. For many of us, the reason we’re not where we want to be is that we’re getting in our own way. But we either don’t know that we’re doing it or don’t know how to stop. A career coach can serve as a mirror and give you clear feedback on ways that your habits and decisions might be blocking you from your goals.

• Accountability. It can be hard to consistently put yourself out there to improve your career. Fortunately, career coaches can give you accountability and help you take more action than you could otherwise to make sure you’re progressing.

How to Find a Career Coach

If you do think that a career coach might be supportive for your professional journey, it can be helpful to speak with a few coaches, and see which one feels like the best fit.

For starters, it’s a good idea to seek out coaches who are accredited. Additionally, you can find coaches who specialize in a niche that you are looking for (like burnout, working parents, career coaches for lawyers, etc).

A good coaching relationship will have good chemistry, just like any other type of relationship. You’ll want to feel comfortable and easeful with your coach.

Expect your career coach to feel like a friend who understands you, but also like a knowledgeable mentor who trust can get you to where you want to go. You should leave sessions feeling clear, energized, and inspired. 

If a prospective coach doesn’t seem professional, or you leave sessions feeling hazy or smaller than you came in, those are signs to look elsewhere.

But if you find a coach who you like and trust, then you may be well on your way toward the fulfillment, career advancement, and professional growth that you seek.

We know finding the right career coach can be a daunting process so we created the IACC career coach directory.

We also have a ”Find Your Coach” service where you answer a few questions to share what you’re looking for, and the IACC executive team will personally review your message and suggest three coaches that could be a great fit for your needs.

And if career coaching sounds like a servie you could imagine offering to others, you can check out our Career Coach Certification training.