Career Coaching

Career Coaching

By Marcia Bench, Davies-Black Publishing, 2003, 392 pages

List price: $34.95, ISBN: 0-89106-184-3

Marcia Bench writes that about 61 percent of American workers are "less than completely satisfied with their work." In Career Coaching, her goal is to help coaches increase their clients' job satisfaction by guiding them toward their "authentic vocation," or genuine calling, while also giving them nuts-and-bolts job-hunting tips.

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Bench, founder and director of the Career Coach Institute in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., addresses her book to coaches and those who are considering coaching careers. She opens with a look at the coaching field. Using checklists, she helps readers determine whether career coaching is the right profession for them.

The book then details Bench's model for career design, called Authentic Vocation, and her coaching model, dubbed Quantumshift coaching.

Coaches who help clients find their authentic vocations also help employers improve productivity and performance, Bench notes. Among the steps toward uncovering an authentic vocation are determining the client's life purpose--not career goals or job descriptions but a direction for the whole of the client's life.

From that broad start, the career design model grows more detailed, examining clients' interests, knowledge, skills and experiences through specific steps. She shows how self-assessment surveys, goal-setting and networking can increase motivation. She provides examples of how to turn work experience into stories that other employers can understand and how to catalogue the client's knowledge, skills and education.

Finding an authentic vocation also includes setting job targets and deciding what work environment best suits the client.

A section on job-search mechanics gives tips on helping clients market themselves for both advertised and "unpublished" jobs. She gives tips on responding to ads, and on writing strong letters and resumes.

Finally, Bench hands readers a sheaf of worksheets, questionnaires and other tools ready for immediate use by coaches and clients.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group