I got a career coach for 6 months and this is what happened!

I always want to be the best in anything I do, or at the very least get better. This is all very easily defined at university, when you have an exam you get a score back which you can improve upon. Or when you play a sport you can very quickly judge your own talent against others and learn from them. However at work it is difficult. You need to judge yourself against your previous self.

The notion of getting better is why I proceeded to find a career coach. At work, it easy to imagine where you want to get to and the skills you want to acquire along the way. But, it is difficult to actually improve and obtain those skills. It is very easy to go on auto pilot and just focus on completing your tasks and projects and forget about self improvement. The deadlines just keep coming!

Goals and Objectives

I was fortunate to find a coaching programme specifically for Imperial graduates. It is targeted for those with 3-5 years of experience. I only had 2 years but to get on the course I stretched the truth a little!

Before getting a coach it is important to understand which, skills you want to work on, goals you want to achieve, and, how you might attain those goals. A coach will help facilitate you in reaching your goals.

For me, the skills I wanted to work on were confidence, leadership and management. All quite broad topics but it helped my coach get a sense of what I wanted to work on.

The very first session was an introductory session. Mainly getting to know each other and explaining my job role to my coach.

Coaching Sessions

The first thing to note is that the coaching sessions are confidential and we signed an agreement to act professionally. Therefore I can’t go into too much detail.

In the first proper session, I explained company culture and the team dynamics. I think this is important as it gives an idea to the coach what possible solutions and blockers there might be in suggesting tasks. 

Well in actual fact the coach didn’t specifically give me tasks and actions to do. The dynamic is that the coach asks certain questions, which I would answer to the best of my ability. The aim was to make me think about the solutions myself, and give myself actionable tasks to complete. I actually really enjoyed this back and forth, as the coach would ask intelligent follow up questions.

It was over the first two sessions that we formulated my goals. These were:

• Presenting at least once a month.
• Lead 3 projects in 6 months.
• Ask for critical feedback after every presentation.
• Run a python training course for half an hour every other week.
• Delegate small tasks on my project to save myself time

Together, my coach and I, tried to make the goals as SMART as possible. By that I mean, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based.

Executing my Goals

It is of course easy to say but difficult to implement in practice. Let us take the last goal. My first issue was given my lack of seniority I thought I couldn’t give other people tasks to do, when in reality that was not the case. So it took a bit of courage to even suggest to a colleague that they could help me out. And then I had another issue, which was working on auto pilot too much such that I forgot that I could be delegating tasks, saving myself time.

And thus we created a new task which was a lot more achievable:

• Put 5 minutes into my calendar each day to think about what personal tasks I can delegate.

This is of course easy to do with a recurring calender event. And it really worked! I was able to identify small tasks that other people could do, and then I could hand those tasks out to other team members. Benefitting myself to save time but also benefitting colleagues to introduce them to a new coding language like Python, for example.

I really struggled with the 4th goal, the idea of creating my own Python course and then teaching that to other colleagues was asking a little too much of myself. But maybe in future I can carry this one out.

Asking for feedback is now something I am doing regularly and it can be really helpful and I’d encourage you to do the same. Feedback in normal day to day tasks, and/or bigger projects can give you direction and something to work towards.

What is next?

The experience has been rewarding for me and there are still plenty of learnings to take from the sessions. Given that it is still fresh in my mind there is less upside into looking for a new coach in the short term. However, this is definitely something I will consider later in the year or, more likely, next year.

I do have an urge to mentor or coach as I see this being really rewarding and I definitely believe I have the skills and knowhow to improve others. So, this is something I am looking to try in the near future.

In any case, I strongly urge you to try career coaching.  if you have just started working or have been working a number of years. I have had a positive experience and I have definitely improved myself.