How to become a career coach

If you are passionate about helping others and want to share your professional knowledge with the world, you may want to consider learning how to become a career coach.

In the last two years, the global coaching industry has grown and evolved to meet the needs of a post-pandemic workforce. Now more than ever, people are reassessing their work and seeking guidance on how to find a more fulfilling career, not just better wages.

In this article, we’ll review the basics of becoming a career coach and give you the tools you need to land your first coaching client. 

Table of contents

• What is a career coach?
• What does a career coach do?
• What skills do you need?
• How to become a career coach
• How do you get career coaching clients?
• How much money can you make as a career coach?

What is a career coach?

A career coach is an expert in career planning and professional development. As a career coach, you’ll work closely with individuals at every stage of their career journey—whether they’re starting a new job search, looking to land a promotion, or exploring a big career change. 

Career coaches can choose to specialize in a specific industry or work more generally in the hiring and recruiting space. Ultimately, the goal of any career coach is to help people maximize their personal and professional potential.  

What does a career coach do? 

Depending on your experience and expertise, you can choose to offer a range of career-related services. Career coaches help with a variety of tasks, including:

• Providing feedback on resumes, cover letters, or LinkedIn profile pages
• Helping clients prepare for interviews or salary negotiations
• Evaluating career options based on a client’s skills and experience 
• Helping clients map out short-term and long-term career goals
• Creating roadmaps for achieving career goals
• Helping clients acquire and practice career-advancing skills
• Offering guidance to help clients overcome obstacles or roadblocks
• Motivating and inspiring clients to reach their highest potential

What skills does a career coach need?

Although you don’t need any certifications to become a career coach, you’ll need to have or acquire specific professional and interpersonal skills to succeed. These skills can include:   

• Communication skills – You’ll need to listen carefully, ask the right questions, and extract key information from your clients. Then, you’ll need to consolidate and communicate your findings efficiently and professionally.
• Analytical skills – You’ll need to collect and analyze information to create a personalized vision or roadmap for your client’s career journey. Analytical skills and strategic thinking will be vital to your coaching success.
• Administrative skills – Running a business isn’t easy. To grow and scale your business, you’ll need essential administrative skills like organization, calendar management, time management, and excellent customer service. 
• Empathy – Above all, you need to meet your clients where they are. Great coaches can easily understand the feelings and needs of their clients and adjust their coaching approach accordingly. 

How to become a career coach

Ready to kickstart your coaching business? Below you’ll find 11 tips to help you hone your niche and start creating your coaching services with ease.

1. Define your niche

Career coaching can be incredibly broad, and there’s a good deal of competition. Defining your niche can help you find the right type of clients for your skills and experience. A well-defined niche can help you gain credibility and establish a more focused business. 

Start by determining “who” you want to work with—individuals or companies. 

Do you want to help college graduates launch their job search and find their dream careers? 

Perhaps, you want to help creative entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Would you rather assist stay-at-home moms to re-enter the workforce? 

Focus on finding a target audience in an area where you are both knowledgeable and passionate.

Next, determine what your target audience needs. Research your audience’s pain points. What problems are they facing? What are their needs, career goals, and frustrations? 

Figure out how you can relate to their struggles and how your business will help them achieve their desired results.

Once you’ve defined your target audience, use this research to guide your messaging and coaching approach.

2. Leverage your experience

Anybody can be a career coach, but you’ll find it easier to attract clients when you have relevant experience. As you define your target audience, outline your coaching skills or other relevant professional work. You can do this by answering the following questions: 

• Have you worked in recruitment, human resources, or career counseling before? 
• If not, have you worked at recognizable companies like Amazon, Salesforce, Google, and so on? 
• Have you achieved career milestones that others in your industry might want to know more about? 

These milestones can be especially useful. Clients may want to learn from you about how you landed your previous jobs or advanced in your chosen field.

Regardless of your background, a successful career before starting a coaching business is an asset, especially if you’d like to coach people in a similar industry.

3. Outline your coaching approach

Like creating a course curriculum, take some time to think about your coaching approach. More specifically, how will you help your clients through coaching? And what tools or methods will you use? 

Your clients will want to know what to expect when signing up for your services, so outlining your coaching approach will help you get organized and plan. 

• What will your first session look like? 
• What information do you need from your clients to help them achieve their goals? How will you go about getting that information? 
• Will you provide clients with activities or templates (resumes, cover letters, career path roadmaps, etc.)?
• What tools or resources will you need to deliver results?

Use the data you’ve gathered from your niche strategy to help guide this process. Start by creating a simple one-on-one package that caters to your target audience’s needs. Remember, you want to serve your clients well and provide a sustainable source of income for your business.

4. Decide on your format 

Start by determining how you will deliver your coaching services. 

• Will you meet in person, virtually, or both? 
• If you plan to take a hybrid approach, where will you meet in person? If you need to rent out a space, how much will it cost? 
• For virtual meetings, what application(s) do you need to host your sessions? 

Don’t be afraid to ask your current or ideal clients how they’d prefer to receive coaching. For the most part, people like the convenience and flexibility of remote coaching. 

In addition to one-on-one coaching, many coaches offer other coaching formats like group coaching programs, courses, cohort-based learning, and more. 

These formats are an excellent way to scale your business and reduce the number of hours spent doing face-to-face client work. Although career coaching requires a more customized approach to each session or client, you may consider integrating a more generalized curriculum later. 

5. Choose your coaching platform

As you grow your business, you’ll need a tool that helps you streamline your processes and provide a personalized experience for each client. You’ll want to choose the right coaching platform for you, and usually, that means choosing one that will scale alongside your business. 

There are hundreds of platforms and tools available to support your coaching business. Start by examining your coaching format and ask yourself what tools you’ll need to deliver high-quality results.

Ultimately, you want a select a platform that is:

• Easy to set up and use
• Customizable
• Scalable as your business grows and changes
• Suitable for your coaching niche

With Teachable coaching, you can create, promote, and manage your coaching business in one place. It can be used as a stand-alone product or as a powerful companion to other coaching formats like online courses or memberships.