4 reasons why professional career coaches are underutilized (and how to fix it for everyone’s benefit)

If you can afford a professional career coach, I strongly recommend you have one. Of course, a career coach is of great help in general. Still, a professional career coach, in other words, someone who has already coached hundreds of people with a high success rate, will bring you to a wholly different level.

What does a professional career coach do, and who uses it?

The career coach will follow you and listen to you carefully for several weeks. Then, they will make you do some assignments to know yourself better. Next, they will help you set an objective in line with your aspirations and give you the necessary tools to reach that objective. Perhaps most importantly, they will track your commitment to completing your tasks.

And that objective can be high if you consider the high-profile people who have used a coach: Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, Andre Agassi, Hugh Jackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Bill Gates. Even Oprah Winfrey likes to repeat how her coach, Martha Beck, helped her become who she is today.

Note that we are not just talking about a professional career coach but also a life coach for these persons. That means in their cases, the coach is not just focused on the career of their “student,” but on everything in general. Indeed, multiple other criteria can influence whether a career is successful or not.

So, if the bests among us have a coach, why don’t more people have one? Why is it that people respond to the idea of having a coach with “I don’t need one”?

Let’s deep dive into the potential reasons and ideas to answer these.

The reasons why few people have a career coach

Many people don’t know what a career coach does

In the introduction of this post, I briefly explained what a career coach does. But let’s face it, few people know about that. A simple reason is that coaching is generally considered more for senior managers and executives. That significantly reduces the number of people coached, even though anyone can benefit from coaching.

Anyone can claim to be a coach

I mentioned at the beginning that celebrities used a life coach. But in this article, I am talking primarily about career coaches or professional career coaches. So, what is the difference exactly?

The title “coach” describes many jobs. In the Jinn career encyclopedia, this article, or this article, or even this one, would represent the job the best. In any case, it is not like you can go to college to become a coach. Martha Beck, Oprah’s coach, holds three degrees in sociology from Harvard, including a Ph.D. At the same time, Tony Robbins did not even attend college and became the coach of many celebrities.

Several organizations are trying to set up certified training so that coaches can deliver services of a certain quality. I think of International Coaching Federation in the US or European Mentoring and Coaching Council in Europe. But you also become an accredited coach with no experience in coaching just by following a course on Udemy, here or here.

Coaching is not only seen as a premium service; it is a premium service

I could have mentioned the cost of such service as the first reason.

Suppose you consider that proper coaching takes about ten sessions, sometimes more, to provide valuable results. In that case, you have a budget, not within reach of everyone. With one session at around $100, few people consider it worth spending so much money to get help for their career unless they already have a well-paid job.

This table from the International Coaching Federation also shows that coaching is mainly carried out in high-income countries.

How do you find an excellent professional career coach?

Considering how poorly informed are people over career coaches, it is no wonder they don’t know how to get a good one.

Of course, you can still google something like “professional career coach,” “professional career coach,” “business coach,” and so on. But once you get all your results, how do you know if a coach is good for you or not?

Most of the time, every coaching company has its website, which will advertise its services and show some testimonials from some of its former clients. As you can imagine, they showcase only positive reviews, which doesn’t help you much. I am unaware of any platform where career coaches are reviewed by the community, like Glassdoor with companies. So basically, you will have to do your research on every coach you get to see if it suits you.

And there lies another difficulty: as I said previously, coaching sessions can extend over a very long period, many months, sometimes even years. Therefore, you better make the right choice from the beginning. Otherwise, you may be stuck in a non-fruitful relationship with your coach, where you would have spent much of your time and money! Fortunately, to mitigate this risk, many coaches propose a first free session to get to know you better and see if you can work on a long term together. Still not much, but better than nothing.

In short, it’s cool to have a career coach, but unfortunately, it’s not for us. Is that it?

Not necessarily.

In general, seeking these services in your home country will always be very expensive. After all, a specialist personally follows you on a long term.

But it is also true that you do not need to be in a specific location or have a particular curriculum to provide such services, which is why anyone can claim to be a coach nowadays. A candidate seeking to prepare an excellent application or a job interview or to be more confident to request a pay rise does not need to find a coach near him. He can find one on the Internet and will remain in close contact with him over chats, emails, and video calls.

Therefore, we could easily imagine this candidate looking for a professional career coach out of his home country, in a country where such services are more affordable. Although the advantage for the candidate is obvious, it is for the career coach too, as they can sell their services to clients with a higher purchasing power than in the local market. Thus, these services cost more while remaining priced reasonably for the client. And with more and more clients, the coach becomes more experienced, gets more recognition (especially if the coached people leave favorable reviews), and can later charge more for more experienced clients.

Such a system would probably bring in more professional career coaches in the long term. But, again, this is perfect, as it would ensure there is still enough competition to keep the prices affordable, meaning more people willing to be coached would join. Eventually, coaches with more expensive rates may even join, as the platform becomes an extensive database of potential clients.

This is where Jinn Marketplace comes in.

What is the benefit of Jinn Marketplace?

Let’s start with a quick introduction of Jinn.

Jinn provides you with answers to the questions related to your career. If you are wondering about different obs, their duties, skills, or career paths, you can use our career encyclopedia. If you are looking for a job or want to post a job, you can do both. But what if you need an expert to follow you to regain your self-confidence or prepare for your next career milestone?

With Jinn Marketplace, you can get all these services. Typically, most candidates never consider career coaching because it is such an expensive service. If you think that 70% of currently employed people are considering a new job, and add those unemployed, that’s a massive market. People would certainly want to stand out from the crowd without spending a fortune. For professional career coaches, especially those in low to middle-income countries, that’s a huge opportunity to reach out to new customers without much effort since we take care of the platform’s promotion. Not to mention that these hours spent coaching are also a key to obtaining more prestigious coaching certifications and thus offering more premium services.

But how, in that case, can you be sure that you are dealing with a professional career coach and not a crook? That is the significant advantage of marketplaces: it is straightforward to leave a review after your purchase. Thus, other users are guided by previously left reviews. And of course, like with most coaches, they would still have the possibility of booking a first free session to make up their minds.

Of course, Jinn Marketplace is not only for people in middle-income countries. This was only an example; many other services can be bought or sold there. Which ones? On this topic, your imagination is the limit if it helps improve career prospects. I will write more about other use cases in another article.

Wrap-up

So, here is our value proposition

• To provide job seekers with affordable access to professional career coaches
• To allow these professional career coaches to reach a new market that is currently under-exploited

If you think you can benefit from this value proposition, either as a candidate or as a coach, don’t wait any longer and register on Jinn, it’s free!