For most people, searching for a job is a time-consuming and anxious experience. Ask anyone looking for a new job or making a career switch, and they will be sure to tell you how rejection or silence from hiring managers or HR departments about the status of their applications can negatively impact self-confidence and self-esteem. Further, the volatile global job market scenario and the changing nature of work has made job seeking more complex and challenging. Fortunately, job seekers now have a powerful resource to help them during this trying time—a career coach!
Contrary to popular belief, a career coach is not just for high-flying professionals or business or industry leaders. Anyone looking for a job or making a career switch can hire a career coach, and as testimonials show, coaches add value in various ways. To begin with, if you are searching for a job, a coach can help with you with some basic, but often overlooked, aspects that could significantly improve your prospects. These include:
Assessing your skills, strengths and limitations: We are often unaware of our potential, reluctant to try new things or how to leverage our existing skills in new ways. Conversely, we are also sometimes unaware of, or turn a blind eye to, our weaknesses. A coach can help to build more self-awareness, and train you to be more reflexive about your skills, strengths, and limitations. By doing so, a coach can help to unlock a client’s hidden potential or to do away with negative thoughts or actions that hinder growth and success.
Diversifying your network: Given his or her vast network, a coach can also help to connect you with people outside your immediate circles, which plays an invaluable role in gaining access to new people and organizations. Having a diverse network is a key criterion in networking success, and by pushing you out of your comfort zone, and alerting you to new ideas and opportunities, a coach can help you branch out and build relationships across industries and outside existing, known networks.
Keeping you motivated and accountable: Searching for that elusive job requires hard work and patience, and between writing, sending, and re-writing (or tweaking) cover letters and resumes, building up your network, and honing your skills, it can often feel like a full-time job in itself! The lack of response or rejection can make this process frustrating and demoralizing. By scheduling regular sessions, a coach will keep you on track as well as motivate you to reach your goals—something you may be remiss to do on your own.
Maximizing your LinkedIn profile: LinkedIn has arguably become the most powerful professional social networking platform globally, functioning simultaneously as a personal branding, networking, industry research and job search site. A career coach can help you improve your LinkedIn profile and maximize its potential by providing practical suggestions about how to use it effectively in your job search.
At Global Lumen HR, the focus is on empowering each and every individual, whether it be an employee re-entering the workforce, a professional feeling their career is plateauing, or a seasoned professional contemplating a career change. Do note, however, that working with a coach also requires effort on a coachee’s part in several ways. I will touch upon this in a later post. For now, keep in mind that a coach is there to help and guide you, but the effort and initiative needs to stem from you, the job seeker. After all, it isa partnership, and like in any good partnership, both parties need to work consistently and collaboratively towards shared success: in this case, landing the job that you have been working so hard to get!
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