Career coaches for clients?

A friend who’s a career coach was telling me how she’s been run off her feet in the past year as victims of the recession’s redundancies come to her for advice about what to do next. As well as helping sacked senior managers get better work life balance and follow their dreams, she’s also an executive coach for people in work, helping improve performance. It must be worth it for the businesses that send their executives to these kinds of coaches, because they aren’t cheap. I would imagine that improved emotional intelligence might mean better staff management and lower turnover, or improved confidence might mean, say, more sales.

It got me thinking that a similar service could be really helpful for claimants as part of the support package to get them back into work. Low self confidence and motivation are well known issues and lots of providers work hard to tackle them. But this kind of career coaching goes one step further than an advisor’s warm words of encouragement to a newly recruited, previously long term unemployed person. It is a totally personalised approach and goes deep to identify and discuss the beliefs a person holds about themselves, their unspoken – very possibly unconscious – fears and presents constructive challenges to their perspective on the world and how it affects their behaviour and relationship to it.

And with an increase in self knowledge, plus some strategies to deal with those tricky ‘trigger’ situations, comes greater resilience; and with resilience, I would argue, comes greater likelihood that the client will choose the right job and stay in it.

Resilience is the ability to roll with the punches, to take setbacks on the chin, to not throw in the towel and fall at the first hurdle. Building resilience is important because great personal change – like moving from not working to working – can be hard, not only for the person undergoing the change, but it has an impact on the relationships that person has. A colleague at a small third sector provider told me a story about how the children of a client were really disconcerted by the disruption to the previous home routine when their mother moved into work and they started playing up, which only increased the mum’s stress at the same time as taking on the new challenge of work. Building resilience to manage the kinds of personal dilemmas when returning to work is vital to successfully sustaining employment.

This is crucial because job sustainability has, rightly, been a focus in the industry for some time. The new contracting systems are recognising this by increasing the length of time a client must be in work before providers are paid.

So would it be cost effective for providers to include regular access to this kind of coaching to claimants, so they could feel the fear and be offered a helping hand to do it anyway?

Are there providers out there that are already offering this kind of coaching or counselling?

And – most importantly – is it working and does it work better than other interventions?