Career Coaching Vs Executive Coaching: What’s the Difference?

According to an Oracle’s study, more than 75% of people worldwide feel “stuck” in their personal and professional lives. While it is perfectly normal to feel this way, the question is how to get out of this and break through.

You may have heard your friends or colleagues suggesting you get coaching or that it has been helpful to them. But if you do a quick search for coaching for career guidance, you are likely to see Google suggesting two specific terms: career coaching & executive coaching. This often confuses people about which is right and what they need to choose to get the most out of the price they pay.

To help you and anyone confused about these terms, this article will give a simple breakdown of career vs executive coaching.

Career Coaching

This type of coaching is for anyone wanting to start, progress, or change their career. It is for anyone at any stage of their professional life - whether it is someone just starting out to step into the corporate world or someone who wants a new career direction after having worked in the same job role for many years.

The primary objective of a career coach is to help people land the dream job they aspire to or transition to their new career, whatever that may be. Career coaching is often for people who are not quite happy with where they are in terms of careers or anyone who knows they want to achieve more but don't know what they need to do to get there.

It is also for anyone who is clear about their career destination but needs help in understanding the best path and strategy to get there by analyzing skills and knowledge gaps.

This can include very practical activities like helping people improve their CVs to make them more attractive to potential employers, creating a professional brand for themselves, or even helping them develop transferable skills or gain qualifications or certifications that will help them land interviews with the companies they want to work for.

Through career coaching, people will also understand how to communicate better, negotiate for salaries, and present themselves as potential candidates during a recruitment process.

Executive Coaching

Unlike career coaching, executive coaching, also known as one-to-one coaching or performance coaching, is designed to provide guidance only for executives, managers, team leaders, individual business leaders, and decision-makers who want to develop themselves.

At least 4 out of every 10 newly promoted managers, leaders, and executives fail within 18 months of starting their new job role. This comes from reasons such as:

• Lack Of Self-Awareness

• Unpreparedness

• Failing To Learn And Adapt

• No Formal Development Processes

• Ineffective Onboarding

• No Initiatives To Establish A Cultural Fit

• Unclear About The Job Role & It's Expectations

• Resisting Change

• Lack Of Emotional Intelligence

• Lack Of Focus And Vision

• Inability To Manage Stress

Executive coaching has evolved as a sustainable solution to overcome these issues. This type of coaching programme involves a series of one-on-one training sessions between a manager or executive and an external professional coach. The ultimate goal of executive coaching is to equip individuals with the knowledge and opportunities they need to develop themselves and become more effective in their respective job roles through behavioral change.

Executive coaching is a service that helps higher management or C-suite of an organization, like CEOs, leaders, and managers to play their role in a more balanced, healthy, and - most of all - effective way to be a successful leader, thereby supporting the growth of the firm.

An individual in a leadership role or an organization in general can get the following benefits from executive coaching:

• Improve performance to motivate teams and communicate productively

• Improve the ability to make decisions and calculated development skill

• Help to develop risk management and navigation abilities

• Develop skills to manage highly stressful working conditions

• Enhance work-life balance

• Increase self-assurance, self-efficacy and overall work satisfaction

On average, executive coaching takes 9-12 sessions across 6-9 months. The gap between these sessions are important to track and evaluate the new approaches and behavior the leaders have adapted in their role from previous sessions.

All in all an executive coach helps executives see things differently with clarity, change mindsets and perceptions, identify their drawbacks, and resolve the limiting beliefs that are holding them back at the higher level of the organizational hierarchy. It also helps with imposter syndrome by using different strategies and mindset tools to help executives and leaders improve self-esteem and gain confidence in their abilities and talents.

Simple Takeaway