Empowering Professionals to Take Command of Their Careers
Empowering Professionals to Take Command of Their Careers
Transitions often begin with a sense of unease. Your work no longer brings the satisfaction that it once did. You may feel bored, restless, low on energy, or pessimistic. Through coaching, you will identify the causal factors and determine whether your current chapter can be 'refreshed,' that is, imbued with a new sense of meaning and purpose with relatively minor changes or whether it is time to make a more significant transition.
You have decided to make a transition, but the destination is unclear. You are likely to enter a period of letting go, turning inward, and testing new options. Mixed feelings of freedom, opportunity, uncertainty, and disorientation are common. The goal of career transition coaching in this phase is to work through the discomfort of not knowing, identify your core values, and start building the outline of your next chapter.
You know where you want to go and what it will look like when you get there. In this phase of coaching, we get down to nuts and bolts of researching the options that fit your criteria, identifying opportunities, and taking action to pursue them. Once you start your new position, we will build a plan for making your first 100 days as successful as possible and sustaining this chapter through the inevitable ups and downs to come.
Under the traditional view of lives and careers, it was assumed that adults followed an orderly pattern of development with a common set of steps in a sequence: Get educated, get a job, get married, have children, work, and retire. The goal of careers was to climb a ladder to increasing levels of pay, prestige, and responsibility.
In a world where stability predominated over change, the linear view made sense. But in today's world of constant change, careers are cyclical and ever-evolving. Education is a lifelong process. Career transitions are increasingly common, and adaptability and toleration for ambiguity are keys to thriving.
Technological and competitive disruptions abound. Office and manufacturing automation is eliminating jobs on a daily basis. Artificial intelligence is rendering even professional services providers less useful. As machine learning continues to grow, we will all need to develop new skills in order to stay relevant.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has trouble replicating 'soft skills' such as understanding, motivating, and interacting with people. These capabilities and others, including persuasion, relationship building, and empathy, will become differentiators as AI takes over other tasks. Coaching is the ideal format for developing these crucial portable skills.
Career transition coaching can help you find long-term satisfaction by taking a big-picture approach, rather than looking only at the next role. Taking the time to understand your values and motivations can make the difference between securing a job you love and getting stuck in the same dynamics that led you to leave the last one.
It can be daunting to re-enter your profession after stepping away, whether for family reasons, to address other priorities, or because of a forced change. Transition coaching can help you refresh your skills, re-establish your professional identity, and build your confidence as you re-launch your professional career.
In the words of the late Peter Drucker, one of most prolific management experts of our time, "If you don't manage your future, somebody else will." Taking a proactive, conscious approach to career decisions does not guarantee success in every aspect of your work. But it does ensure that wherever you land, it will be a destination you chose, not somewhere you drifted to as a result of someone else's decisions.
