Reflections on My Life as Career Coach
Implications for helping professionals and their clients.
Posted February 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
I’m in my 36th year as a career and personal coach, and I've had the privilege (that's not just a cliche, it's true) of helping more than 6,000 clients navigate a central part of their life.
Perhaps it's time to share some candid reflections in hope they might be helpful not just to career counselors and coaches but to other helping professionals as well as to clients.
A few observations on ethics
I want to start with ethics. The older I get, the more central I am finding ethics to be. I’ve been a little disappointed in myself for not fully walking my talk about career counselor ethics. On these pages, I’ve wondered about the ethics of career counselors' making their clients look like better candidates for a job than they are. And I've been critical of hired guns who write their clients’ resume—I view that as no more ethical than a parent writing their child’s college application essay. I haven't done the latter but have helped job candidates prepare for interviews, including suggesting compelling answers. I don't do that for the money. It's mainly because it’s hard to say no, and perhaps because I rationalize , “It’s not that big a deal.” I'm not really sure I understand why I do it; I only know it's true.
One more ethical issue: There’s temptation to encourage a private-practice client to schedule a next session, even if not really needed. Here, I believe I'm on solid ground. At the end of each session, I honestly describe the extent to which I believe a next session is appropriate. If anything, I err on the side of not pushing for another session to ensure that my ethics are solid. A related point, I consider it unethical for counselors to offer only packages of multiple sessions. Progress and compatibility vary in ways that often cannot be anticipated, so I believe that the only ethical pricing is per-session.
On a more positive note, I feel good about helping people choose a career and make the most of their work life, and more often than I would have anticipated, their romantic life and parenting —career often bleeds into the personal. Over the decades, I've spent more and more time learning about and helping clients with such issues.
I do think that career coaching requires much more expertise than many coaches have. Many are nice people with a bent toward marketing themselves, but they don't know enough about the world of work.
Work-world expertise that makes for an effective career counselor
For example, the physician who doesn’t burn out needs to balance caring with a thick skin in the face of death and intractable disease, a tolerance for inordinate paperwork, the humility to recognize that despite the long, expensive, sometimes boring training, because medicine is still in its adolescence and the field is rapidly changing, there's much they don’t know, and the overwhelmed health care system means that even if the doc knows what to do, errors in the health care chain and bureaucratic delays cause excess morbidity and mortality. Even pre- COVID , 150,000 patients die unnecessarily every year in hospitals alone because of medical errors, the third leading cause of death! As a result, many doctors try to transfer out of clinical practice into management , patient review, etc.
It’s tough for a career counselor or client to discover such information by reading or in an informational interview. I’ve learned such things from confidential discussions with thousands of clients, and because I’ve chosen to specialize in just a few fields: physicians, attorneys, executives, and educators, I know more of those fields' subtleties than I would had I been a generalist.
Would I become a career coach/counselor if I were starting over? I’m not sure. I love the autonomy, feel pretty good about the ethics, appreciate the peaceful work environment, and that almost all my clients find me helpful. But as any helping professional knows, change often occurs slowly. I’m fast-paced and wonder if I might have made a bigger contribution as an in-and-out consultant to organizations that I believed in, or even doing something completely different, for example, full-time writer or even genetics researcher.
So, dear reader, whether helping professional or client, as I am wont to ask at the end of sessions and talks, is there at least one thing you want to remember from today’s session?
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
Marty Nemko, Ph.D ., is a career and personal coach based in Oakland, California, and the author of 10 books.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.