We look at 3 articles on how career coaching can help high flying graduates
From successful sportsmen and women to actors, business people, presidents and prime ministers, all ambitious people have coaches or mentors to help them reach the top of their game. It should be no different for graduates with ambitions to fly high. Standing out above others is no easy feat. A graduate career coach helps you discover how, and that’s why graduates who have career coaching are much more likely to be successful in their efforts to find the job they want. They are more focused, self-aware and therefore confident at job interviews and beyond.
We have pulled out three articles from our archives that look at some of the areas graduate coaching can help with.
Graduate coaching helps with your transferable skills
You face a highly competitive graduate job market and so getting a degree is only the first step to your goal to get a good job. Graduate career coaching can help you get past the job interview even if you have little actual work experience.
The key here is to emphasise your employability skills, or soft skills, which employers really do look for. You essentially build these skills through work experience but you can also develop and transfer them from other experiences, like those gained through college, university, gap years, church or community and voluntary work.
These skills include: team working, problem solving, self-management, knowledge of the business, literacy and numeracy competence, ICT knowledge, leadership skills, and good interpersonal proficiencies. According to the Edge Foundation, these soft skills can be developed by training yourself to think and talk about them.
Graduate coaching can help you to bring out strengths and abilities you didn’t know you had and then to sell them during the job interview.
Graduate coaching can help you to answer interview questions better
Many graduates look great on their CV but crumble at the job interview stage because they’re nervous. They know what they want to say but their minds simply go blank.
It all comes down to knowing how to answer interview questions. Through practice, practice and more practice graduate coaching can help you to overcome such dilemmas altogether by helping you to gain more insight into the job role and industry. You will find it easier to give natural responses to job interview questions asked in a variety of interview styles – and not just generic questions, but actual real questions about YOU. When you are confident about what to say when answering interview questions about your own skills and experience, you will feel much more relaxed about the whole experience and less likely to feel caught off guard.
Graduate coaching can help you become much more career focused
Another advantage of graduate career coaching is how much it can help you to become sharp and focused. People who know who they are, what they are about and what they want attract attention. Coaching can help if you don’t have a specific career in mind – perhaps you find yourself applying for such a wide variety of jobs that there doesn’t seem to be any logic to your job finding efforts. Or perhaps you do have a career focus in mind, in which case you will gain direction and therefore acceleration of your efforts. Having a specific career in mind does not necessarily mean having a specific job in mind; it just means being clear on the field you want to enter and the type of work you want to do in it. When you know what career steps to take it removes a lot of the guesswork – as well as the extra time, effort and frustration that comes with it.
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