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Career coaching (Spring 09)
- Career coaching: giving HE students tools to think about their lives and plan careers
- Summary
- Introduction
- What is career coaching?
- How do the career coaching circles work?
- Personal Development Planning and employability
- The importance of taking time out
- What the students said:
Career coaching: giving HE students tools to think about their lives and plan careers
Summary
In this article, Annika Coughlin, Action Research Assistant and ELLI project co-ordinator at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning from the University of Bedfordshire, interviews Peter McCormack, a qualified adviser and life coach, about conducting a career coaching circle with a group of higher education students. Throughout the 8 week course, the students worked in a group and the aim was to give them the tools and the ability to develop a clear long-term structure to their lives.
Introduction
Peter McCormack is a qualified careers advisor and life coach. He has fused together his knowledge and skills of careers guidance techniques with that of life coaching to develop his unique style of careers coaching. He is currently a careers coach at an organisation that works with unemployed people with mental health difficulties. Clients might have schizophrenia, be bi-polar or are depressed and many of his clients have had mental breakdowns due to stress from their executive jobs. Alongside this work, Peter is also a self-employed career coach and runs career coaching sessions for all sorts of clients and companies.
The Centre for Personal and Career Development at the University of Bedfordshire invited Peter to conduct a career coaching circle with a group of 7 students as part of a HECSU funded project called “Enhancing career planning through peer mentoring and career coaching.” The outcomes from this research and the materials provided by Peter will be shared with careers staff at the University to see how they might be adapted to their one to one advice and guidance work with students and recent graduates – but also, and more significantly, to integrate some of the processes and content into the University’s employability focused curriculum.
Annika Coughlin, research assistant at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning interviewed Peter and the students to assess the impact so far.
What is career coaching?
What is the difference between guidance and coaching?
Peter:
I think with career coaching there is much more emphasis on the persons cognition - on their thoughts, actions and behaviour. With coaching we take into account everything, for example, how a career choice might impact on other parts of their lives. You might talk with a client for a whole hour about how a certain job will impact upon their personal relationships. Careers guidance might give you an immediate ‘solution’ to your problem, but career coaching gives the client the ability to develop a clear long-term structure to their lives. It is much more sustainable than guidance in the sense that the client’s plans are much more flexible and have been thought through holistically. Coaching also involves using a lot of motivation and confidence boosting exercises.
How do the career coaching circles work?
Peter:
A career coaching circle involves using career coaching techniques but in a group rather than a one-to-one session. It is a co-creative process that empowers a group of individuals. My strategy for the whole 8 week course with the students was to spend 15 to 20 minutes of each two hour session giving them a very brief presentation, giving them the ideas and then that was it, I stepped back and let them do it, just go round peppering them with little ideas here and there. That was my conscious strategy as I wanted them to own the experience. I didn’t want to be another lecturer saying to them ‘it works like this, it works like that.’ It wasn’t easy for me to do that because I am an ex-teacher!
The students told me that they actually ended up coaching their friends and family. They used the word ‘tools’, they felt they now had the tools to think about their lives differently and help others do the same.
Peter:
I am glad that they applied the coaching techniques to coach other people. I got one of the students to chair a session because I wanted them to say ‘look we can do this,’ over half way through this I said they had enough tools now to do this themselves. Again it’s about empowering students and making them realise that they’ve got everything they need within them.
Being in a group was really beneficial. For example, sometimes a student might say ‘I really admire how this person does this,’ and then another would say the same about another. And all it is, is a case of saying ‘ask this person how they do that so you can do the same actions to do it.’ Being in a group means each member can share the ‘secrets’ of their success. My clients with mental health difficulties carry on with the coaching circle by themselves. They invite me along as a visitor once in a while, but they have the ability and tools to continue it without me now, which is great.
Personal Development Planning and employability
The University of Bedfordshire is very focused upon Personal Development Planning and employability. How do you think career coaching can fit into an institutions’ PDP or employability programme?
Peter:
I worked as a careers advisor for two years at the University of Bedfordshire, and from what I remember the PDP there is very holistic. Partly why I trained to be a life coach was because when I left the University and went to work as a careers advisor in other organisations, they never took this holistic approach. And I needed more. I think you could take the PDP to a whole new level by incorporating coaching. Any careers advisor can do it by weaving in bigger coaching type questions. For example ‘How will this work out for you in your future, how will this impact on you, what is your support structure?’ There is a gap in the advice given to students which coaching can fill.
The importance of taking time out
The students really enjoyed the sessions, and looked forward to them. There have been some immediate impacts. Most notably it has enabled them to change their way of thinking. For example one realized that she didn’t want to follow a path she thought she had to (university, work, marriage and babies) and is now going to go onto further study, another managed to sort out her finances so she can now do voluntary work in the future and another who is thinking of entering the NHS has rejected all the negativity she has been exposed to from colleagues and the media and is able to make up her own mind. Overall, it made them more positive, focused and able to think for them selves.
Peter:
I am really pleased with the impact it has had on them. What I hoped to achieve was that they would leave the coaching circle at the end of the eight weeks with different outlooks on their lives, higher ambitions, self-belief and self-confidence. For them to find themselves sounds a bit clichéd, but unless they go to see a coach or go into counseling or something, they’ll never have the opportunity to be in a space where they can really get in touch with themselves.
Yes, they did say that they were really appreciative of the opportunity to take time out to think about themselves. Was there anything about the HE students that was different from your usual clients?
Peter:
What I noticed about the students that differed from my usual clients was that they were really motivated, but were so busy with their studies and work. I began to realise that I was giving them too much homework and I began to realise again that they were at a critical stage in the HE, you know, final year students, some were working as well. If I had my time again, I’d drop the homework and try and weave it into the sessions. I also realise that a lot of cognitive homework was going on anyway, you never leave a coaching session without thinking a lot about it and yourself afterwards
What the students said:
Finally Peter, I asked the students how they would advertise the coaching to others who may be skeptical, which many of them were at first. They said:
Go into it with an open mind and give it a try. It is beneficial to anyone but I think especially for those who are struggling career wise or lack inspiration or motivation
It helps you really address how you reach your end goals. It makes you see the difference between a fantasy and reality and teaches you the steps on how to get there
I was really muddled about what I wanted to be and do, careers coaching helped me realize who I am and what I want out of life. There are so many lost people at university so I think students would really benefit from it
I think it helps you look at situations in another light. Rather than always thinking this is what I think, it’s nice to be in a group and see oh actually, there are other sides of things, it’s helped me view things in different ways
They also said the personality of facilitator was important to them. Some were initially worried that coaching might be a bit ‘weird,’ and were scared that you might be a bit ‘odd’ but they were relieved and amazed by your openness, warmth and listening skills. They wanted me to tell you that.
Peter:
I am really pleased! This was the first time I have run a career coaching circle with higher education students and would love to do it again. I offered all the participants a free one on one follow up session with me and I look forward to hearing from them. I don’t believe that I can give them a career after 16 hours. I’m more about teaching them how to live their life to the best of their ability, be the best that they can be as a person. And when they are there, they are ready to start their careers. I like to think they’ll enter the workplace much more wholly rounded individuals than I believe a regular graduate who hasn’t had this opportunity will.
For more information about Peter McCormack and the services he offers please go to: http://careercoachonline.co.uk/default.aspx
For more information about the HECSU project please contact Eileen Scott
Findings from the research and the follow up research will be posted on the University of Bedfordshire CETL website: www.beds.ac.uk/bridgescetl
Go to the HECSU web site to find out more about the PROP research projects
http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/hecsu.rd/news_practitioner_research.htm
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