Career Coaching: Separating Hype from Help

Next Step Navigator is a career newsletter mixing real talk with real advice to help you tackle the job hunt and carve out your own unique path. It’s like grabbing a coffee with a mentor who shares stories and strategies to boost your confidence and guide you towards making strategic, meaningful career moves.

If you’ve ever Googled “career advice” or watched a few too many seconds of CareerTok before swiping away, I can almost guarantee your social feeds are inundated with extremely confident, sincere-sounding folks assuring you that they can land you that next job in 3 simple steps.

Enter the online “Career Coach”, a brand of service professional-turned-influencer feeding you quip-y, easy-to-execute sounding advice that ends with “buy my course” or “book a discovery call”!  

Career development is a legitimate industry with many qualified employment counsellors and career education professionals, but they are not the loudest, most present folks if you do a quick scroll through LinkedIn or TikTok.  

‘Coaching’ is highly unregulated and often preys on people experiencing stress, hardship or crises.  These influencer-coaches have a compelling story to tell, are excellent marketers, have well-designed content and give just enough away for free to convince you that you should pay for their services.

Many career coaches seem to interpret their job as simply making the client feel good through self-reflective exercises, motivational quotes, readings and other busy work designed to give you a confidence boost.  Building confidence and resiliency is absolutely necessary to move forward in your career - but you know what I think builds career confidence more effectively than endless journalling?  Being taught concrete, effective job search strategies where you set and regularly achieve small, flexible, actionable goals, building momentum in your job search.

Career coaches seem effective because they give you activities to fill your time, like making 1000 tiny changes to your LinkedIn profile, endlessly analyzing strengths and weaknesses, spending hours on resume formatting and doing reflective writing exercises.  

The metrics that matter are getting interviews and getting offers.  And if the work you are doing with a coach is not feeding those two outcomes, they may be doing you a disservice.

Now, an enormous caveat - no career coach, advisor, teacher or consultant can actually guarantee interviews or job offers.  There are so many factors outside of everyone’s control.  But if a coach’s process is not teaching you the practical skills to move towards interviews and offers, you are paying for at worst, bad advice, and at best, weeks of busy work, someone to talk to and journal prompts.  

I may seem overly critical of career coaching, but I have seen vulnerable people get taken advantage of.  If you need the support of a career coach, I advise you to be highly critical of their credentials, really clear about what you want out of the relationship and suspicious of general, unrealistic or vague advice.  

Ask these kinds of questions:

• What experience do you have as a career coach?

• What credentials and education do you have?

• What types of clients are you best suited to support?  (everyone has a niche and expertise - if they say they can help anyone, don’t believe them!!)

• What is your process?  How do you support clients in achieving their goal of landing a job? (or changing careers, getting a promotion, etc.)

• How much will this cost?  What will I take away at the end? (i.e. will your coach teach you strategies you can use and execute on your own in future job searches?)

Two other considerations:

• Do they make unreasonable claims?  (no one can guarantee 100% that they will land you a job)

• Are they associated with a legitimate professional association or other well-recognized group within the profession? 

• Are they willing to be honest about not being the right person to support you and willing to make a referral?

The right person to support you may not be ‘perfect’ according to those questions, but it’s food for thought.  If you are spending money, you deserve to receive professional services with integrity.

My own style is not flashy - I’m an educator and career development professional and I teach people practical job search strategies to find meaningful work.  I do this work in my 9-5, and while I probably wouldn’t rack up the most views on CareerTok,  I do my work with integrity, maintain ethical boundaries in my practice and have folks come away not only feeling good, but steps closer to their career goals (which actually does make you feel good - see how that works?)

What are your thoughts on coaching?  What do you hear in the online career advice space?  Let me know and share this with a friend!

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