The subject was reverse recruiting.

And if your clients haven’t asked you about it yet, they probably will soon.

Job seekers are exhausted.

In a difficult market, that exhaustion opens the door to services promising to handle everything for them: logging into their accounts, blasting out applications, even contacting employees on their behalf.

Some charge a set fee. Some take a percentage of the client’s starting salary. Some charge both.

Let that sit for a moment.

This is predatory marketing dressed up as career coaching language.

After 20 years of working with job seekers and the professionals who coach them, I want to give you what you need to know when a client comes to you having already looked into this.

There is no secret database

Reverse recruiting services imply they have access to exclusive, hidden roles.

They don’t.

They’re searching LinkedIn, checking job boards, and browsing company websites, the exact same places your clients are already looking.

The mystique is part of the pitch.

Quality job searching doesn’t scale

A real job search is personal.

It requires targeting the right roles, building genuine relationships, leveraging warm introductions, and telling a story that connects with a company’s specific needs.

When you hand that work to someone operating at volume, you get copy-paste outreach and generic applications, which is exactly what most clients are trying to move away from.

No one can guarantee job search success. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The LinkedIn factor

Some reverse recruiters want to log directly into a client’s account and message people on their behalf.

This violates LinkedIn’s User Agreement and hands over the most valuable professional asset your client has, their network, to someone with no long-term stake in protecting it.

To be fair, there are elements of this model that carry real value.

Teaching someone to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator strategically, building a targeted company list, helping a client craft outreach that actually sounds like them, these are skills worth developing and ones you can teach in a session or two.

They stay with the client long after the work together ends, which is the difference between coaching and a transaction.

You don’t disappear after taking a percentage of their first paycheck.

The harder conversation

Some clients will walk away from working with us to try one of these services.

They want a guarantee we can’t give them. They’re worn down and want someone to take the wheel.

Our job is to build the skills, strategy, and resilience that make outcomes possible. That’s a more honest service than any guarantee.

Desperation is expensive.

“Someone else will handle it” is rarely the right answer when what’s at stake is someone’s livelihood, their professional identity, and their next chapter.

That’s why they came to us in the first place. Let’s make sure they remember that.

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

Sometimes there’s a clear answer.

A résumé lacks focus, a narrative needs sharpening, or a strategy is missing structure.

In those moments, coaching moves the way we expect it to: Adjust the input, and the outcome improves.

Then there are the harder cases. A client is doing the right things. Applications go out but interviews stall. Weeks pass without a meaningful response.

The effort is consistent, but progress is not.

This is where confidence begins to erode, for clients and for the coaches supporting them.

Huntr’s Job Search Trends Report helped me put language around what many of us are already sensing in practice.

The market is slow

According to the report, the median time to first offer stretched to 83 days, with half of all candidates waiting nearly two weeks after interviews just to receive a decision.

One in five submitted over 100 applications before landing an offer.

None of that reflects low capability. It reflects process drag. When clients don’t understand this context, they internalize the friction.

They start doubting themselves when they should be revisiting their strategy.

Our job as coaches is to interrupt that story early and replace it with something grounded in reality.

Volume is not the solution

The report found that tailored résumés outperform mass applications at a 1.6x higher conversion rate from application to interviews, offers, or hires.

Experienced coaches know this. Getting clients to believe it is another challenge entirely.

When candidates panic, they default to volume because more applications feel like more control. We can use this data to show them the truth: the market penalizes that approach.

Clients need help slowing down enough to target, clarify, and position themselves well before sending another application out the door.

Trust in the hiring process has eroded

Nearly 90% of job seekers report being ghosted after interviews.

Almost half believe AI rejects them before a human ever reviews their materials.

This creates a job search environment that feels opaque, even when candidates are doing everything right.

Career coaches have a growing responsibility to help clients navigate that ambiguity and separate real obstacles from the myths that quietly stall momentum.

Ethics are under pressure

One of the most sobering findings in the report: 44% of job seekers would consider using AI to fabricate or exaggerate qualifications.

I don’t read that as a character flaw. I read it as desperation in a system that feels stacked against people. Career coaches play a critical role here.

We help clients compete without crossing lines they’ll later regret, and that means teaching ethical AI use in a way that enhances what they already have rather than misrepresenting it.

The data confirms what many of us have been feeling for a while.

The job market is harder to read, slower to respond, and more discouraging than it used to be.

Clients need coaches who can help them hold their footing in it.

What’s your biggest challenge in the job market at the moment?

Heather Maietta

The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

Twenty high school boys, one kitchen, and what I thought was a reasonable amount of food.

Before I started cooking, I asked Jack a simple question: how much does it take to feed a team?

He didn’t even hesitate.

“Mom, whatever you’re picturing, double it. Then add more.”

He also told me the chicken tenders would be gone in the first five minutes, no matter how many trays I put out.

What hockey players taught me about career growth

Most people underestimate what growth actually requires.

They plan for the job search, the transition, the new role, or the promotion based on what feels reasonable from where they’re standing. Then reality arrives and asks for considerably more than expected.

More time.

More patience.

More emotional energy.

More persistence than they thought they had.

This is where capable, qualified people begin to question themselves.

They assume that if the process feels harder than anticipated, they must have misjudged something or fallen behind. That belief slowly erodes confidence, even when nothing has actually gone wrong. Careers are long, adaptive processes that stretch as you move through them.

You can prepare thoroughly and still be surprised by how much is asked of you.

Growth tends to expand before it stabilizes, and that expansion can feel alarming if you are not expecting it.

Stretching yourself

The professionals who move through this well share a common trait.

They adjust their expectations early. They stop interpreting difficulty as evidence that something has gone wrong. They pace themselves rather than waiting for conditions to feel perfect, and they understand that needing more time or support is not a personal shortcoming.

It’s simply part of the terrain.

As career coaches, this is one of the most important things we can help our clients internalize.

Feeling underprepared does not mean being unqualified. More often, it means someone is doing something that genuinely matters to them.

Much like feeding twenty teenage hockey players, you rarely get it exactly right the first time.

You learn, you adjust. Next time, you buy more chicken tenders.

Knowing when enough is enough

I have spent considerable time building a course for career professionals, and its launch brought up something unexpected.

→ Messages from coaches who felt seen.

→ Registrations from people who had been quietly following my work for years.

→ Conversations that reminded me exactly why I built it.

The work had landed where it was meant to land.

So I paused and let myself sit with that instead of immediately moving on to what came next.

Recognizing when you have done the work, and letting yourself acknowledge it, matters as much as the work itself.

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

I was a doctoral student buried in research on college students and career transitions. It was a niche topic, and there wasn’t much written on it. Then I found one book that came close to what I was studying. Most researchers would have cited it, noted the author, and moved on.

Something in me decided to call him instead.

I wasn’t trying to network.

I had a burning question I wanted answered. So I found his number, called, and said something like:

“Hi, you don’t know me, but your book inspired my research. There isn’t much out there on this topic. Have you ever thought about doing another publication?”

He paused. Then he said:

“Why don’t you do it?”

That one phone call led to a two-year connection.

That connection led to a fifteen-year collaboration.

We have co-authored books, articles, and chapters together. We have presented at conferences side by side. He became a mentor, then a sponsor, and eventually someone I consider family.

All because I picked up the phone and asked a question.

Practicing what we preach

As career coaches, we say this to clients all the time:

Follow up after the interview. Reach out to that person in the field. Send the message. Make the call.

How often do we take our own advice?

Reaching out feels risky. It makes us vulnerable. We tell ourselves we will do it when we have something more polished to say, when we have done more research, when we feel ready.

That moment rarely arrives on its own.

If I had waited until I felt qualified enough to call that author, that relationship would never have existed.

Serendipity rewards those who act, not those who wait.

Don’t put it off

Every major opportunity in my professional life has started with curiosity and a willingness to reach out without expecting anything in return.

Take a quiet moment to think about the people who have shaped your path.

Then think about the people you haven’t met yet, but might, if you simply reached out.

There might be a conversation waiting to begin. There could be someone who needs to hear from you.

Opportunities are plentiful, but they rarely come looking for us.

Who could you reach out to this month, just to ask a question or start a conversation?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

Are you coaching by asking powerful questions?

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Not resting, exactly.

More like turning around and looking at the road already traveled before mapping the next stretch.

It’s easy to get caught in the rhythm of client calls, deadlines, and emails. That rhythm is useful. It keeps things moving.

It can also pull you so far forward that you lose sight of what’s already behind you and how much of it actually mattered.

Reflection sounds simple, but it takes discipline.

I don’t do it as often as I should. When I finally sat down this year to take stock, I was surprised by what I saw.

A year of showing up

Over the past year, I’ve posted on LinkedIn every single day.

That’s 365 posts on career growth, professional development, and the realities of doing meaningful work. Some days the content reached thousands. Other days, the audience was small.

Both days counted.

I was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from my university, recognition I didn’t see coming, for work I had simply kept doing.

After a long break, I returned to public speaking. This took courage I had to find slowly.

None of those things felt significant in the moment that they happened.

A single post.

A single email.

A single step back onto a stage.

Each one felt ordinary. Together, they became something I’m proud of.

Small actions deserve a second look

We tend to measure progress by momentum, by the feeling that things are accelerating.

Progress doesn’t always feel that way. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of persistence. Career growth is built on small, repeatable actions that rarely feel impressive in the moment.

The discipline of showing up.

The choice to follow through when motivation has faded.

The consistency of doing the work when no one is watching.

Those aren’t flashy moves. That’s the point.

Over time, they compound into something no shortcut can replicate.

Your turn

If you haven’t done it yet, take ten minutes this week to ask yourself one question:

What did I build this year, one small action at a time?

You might be more surprised by the answer than you expect.

The daily work you dismissed as ordinary has already added up to something real.

Reflection is how you get to see it.

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

I’ve been a career coach for over 20 years.

Along the way, I took the Facilitating Career Development course, became an instructor, sat on the committee that rewrote the student manuals, and joined the pilot committee when the credential process was revised.

Every time an opportunity came up to contribute, I said yes. Those decisions, over time, led me to a commissioner role with the National Career Development Association’s Credentialing Commission. That happened because I kept showing up and building genuine relationships with the people in my field.

Most career professionals are thinking about networking in a way that simply doesn’t work.

They join professional organizations, pay the membership fees, attend a conference once a year, collect a few business cards, and wonder why nothing is happening.

Engagement builds credibility

You can’t contribute expertise you don’t have yet.

So start by taking the courses your professional organization offers. Get credentialed. Build a real foundation.

The career professionals who build strong networks keep going. They become instructors, teach the next cohort, and bring newer members into the fold.

When you do that, your value and credibility grow, but more than that, your relationships deepen. The people you teach remember you and eventually become part of the network that opens doors.

It all starts with contribution.

Volunteering gets you in the room

Professional organizations are always revising their student manuals, credentialing standards, and educational content.

They need people on the committees, and most coaches ignore these opportunities, assuming it’s not a good use of their time.

When you volunteer, you get access to the people shaping your field.

You work alongside experts in a way that doesn’t happen at conferences. You let people experience your thinking and your work ethic firsthand.

That’s where the relationships that advance your career are really formed.

Consistency compounds over time

Real network-building takes years, not months.

It means showing up when they need volunteers, participating when they ask for input, and contributing your expertise when the chance comes around.

That’s what creates a reputation.

You’re going to be a coach for the long term.

So you can either spend those years paying dues, or you can spend them building real credibility and a network that reflects it.

Professional organizations are investments.

Like any investment, the returns only show up when you put in the work.

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

At times, my inbox has been flooded with messages from coaches asking, “How do I help my clients see past this?” When your client has just been laid off, telling them “this is an opportunity” feels tone-deaf. We have to communicate it differently.

The coaches who help their clients recognize their chance now, are the ones who will create the most impact.

History tells a different story

We have seen these cycles of corporate restructuring before.

Companies do a clean sweep, reorganize, and then hire people back. They don’t rehire everyone, though. They hire the people who stayed flexible and kept their skills sharp during the disruption.

The people who don’t get rehired are the ones who were not performing or had become a liability.

Companies use restructuring as an opportunity to shed that weight and rebuild with a cleaner organization. An estimated six million people will be leaving the workforce over the next five to seven years.

Younger generations will not fully replace them. AI is also expected to be a net creator of jobs rather than a destroyer, which changes the long-term picture considerably.

The bigger picture is that companies will soon face an increasing need for workers as the employee pool shrinks.

The opportunities are coming.

The real question is whether your clients will be ready for them.

The grief can’t be indefinite

One of my clients once shared a personal rule for handling setbacks that has always stayed with me.

When something happens that upsets her, whether she goes for an opportunity and it does not work out or she finds herself in a situation of forced change, she allows herself 24 hours to feel sad and angry.

After those 24 hours, she simply asks herself, “Okay, what are we going to do to move forward?”

That is genuinely useful advice for everyone going through a job loss.

For some of your clients, it might be 48 hours or 72 hours.

Whatever that window is, it can’t be an indefinite stay in what I call the uncertainty hole.

While they are grieving, other people are doing the work to grow their skills and find that next role. As career coaches, we have to be empathetic to the stages of grief that come with job loss. It truly is like losing something significant.

Our role is to be the sounding board that helps clients process it quickly and move into action.

The skills audit

Start by helping your clients be honest with themselves.

What were some of the reasons behind the layoff?

Was it purely restructuring, or were there gaps in performance that played a role?

Self-awareness is everything at this stage.

From there, do the audit.

Where are their skills right now?

What could be missing?

There is a tremendous amount of free or low-cost learning available that can help fill those knowledge gaps.

This is about identifying strengths and weaknesses, then filling them incrementally.

Every time a client makes progress, they rebuild their own confidence and create real momentum moving forward.

The job market is restructuring across the board, and those who succeed will be the ones who keep learning and stay adaptable.

Your role is to guide them as they move through the emotional fluctuations of finding a new position. It is easy to say “embrace the uncertainty,” but genuinely hard to do it in practice.

That’s exactly why they need you.

How do you help clients move from grief to action after a layoff?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

I scroll through LinkedIn and come across career professionals I know personally, people who are genuinely excellent at what they do.

Their coaching skills are sharp.

Their instincts are good.

Their clients are lucky to have them.

Yet their LinkedIn profiles tell a completely different story.

They haven’t posted in months, their bios are half-finished, and there’s little trace of activity.

If we’re coaching clients to build their personal brands, we have a responsibility to build our own first.

Visibility is credibility

We’re long past the days when you could quietly do good work behind the scenes and count on reputation alone to carry you forward.

The professional world has moved on, and the way people find, evaluate, and trust career professionals has moved with it.

If a coach’s LinkedIn profile shows no activity for nine months, it sends out the wrong message. Potential clients and collaborators spend their time on LinkedIn researching and making decisions about who they want to work with. Branding is an essential part of the job now.

How can we teach personal branding while refusing to show up ourselves?

Building your brand

When I started building my own brand, I treated it like a professional commitment rather than an afterthought.

I dedicated thirty minutes every morning to posting, responding, and sharing something of value. That consistency built a habit that paid dividends twelve months later.

Do I love social media? No.

Do I believe in what it can do for our field? Absolutely.

Personal branding doesn’t have to mean self-promotion. Done well, it’s a form of service. It’s how people find the ideas and expertise we have to offer.

If career coaches want their clients to show up and advocate for themselves in a competitive world, then we have to model that courage.

Start this week

Take ten minutes to look at your online presence through a client’s eyes.

→ Would you hire someone with a profile like yours?

→ Would a potential employer or collaborator know what you stand for?

→ Is there evidence that you’re active, engaged, and contributing to the field you serve?

You don’t have to overhaul everything at once.

Commit to one small, visible act that says you’re here and you’re engaged.

Start with one post, or update one section of your profile. If we’re going to teach visibility, we owe it to our clients to live it ourselves.

What’s the one thing stopping you from showing up more consistently on LinkedIn?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

It’s one of the most common traps in career coaching, and almost every coach has fallen into it at least once.

We all tell ourselves, “This isn’t the real coaching work,” yet it can consume half our time if we let it.

Most clients you work with will eventually need you to look at their resume. It’s a means to an end, but it’s not where your real value lies as a coach. That’s where AI tools come in.

They have the power to give you your coaching hours back.

The resume is a vehicle

Even if a client doesn’t hire you for resume help, you’ll still review it to understand who they are and how they’re telling their story.

The resume is the tangible thing clients cling to.

Meanwhile, the strategy and mindset work is what actually changes their lives. If you spend all your time editing documents, you’re short-changing both sides. You lose your energy and put their transformation in jeopardy.

That’s why we should see AI tools as a resource, not a threat.

Reclaim your coaching time

You don’t have to overhaul your practice or become a “tech person” to benefit from AI tools.

Begin by offloading the things that drain your time but don’t require your professional judgment.

Think about it this way:

→ Formatting and keyword alignment: Tools like Teal automate layout fixes and job-match optimization.

→ Starter phrasing: ChatGPT can help generate draft language based on your client’s notes. You still refine the story, but you speed up the process without starting from a blank page.

→ Prep research: AI can summarize job postings or extract information about transferable-skills.

The goal isn’t to hand off the career coaching. You’re clearing the runway so you can focus on the deep work.

Why I recommend Teal

Full transparency: I’m an affiliate for Teal. I recommend it because I use it myself, and it saves me hours.

Teal’s resume builder does the heavy lifting.

• Resume and cover letter formatting.

• Tailoring your skills and experience to specific roles.

• Storing multiple versions in one dashboard for easy access.

It frees you up to focus on the coaching conversations that matter most.

Time for the real work

When you stop sinking hours into admin, you can redirect that time toward the essential tasks that help your clients.

AI helps you move faster, so you can get into the transformation elements of your process sooner.

Reducing the time you spend buried in resumes is possible, with the right approach.

Technology protects the human side of coaching. When we let tools handle the logistics, we reclaim the margin to listen deeper and coach with more presence.

That’s the kind of future I want for this field, and for you too.

What’s one part of your process you’d love to hand off to AI so you can spend more time on the work that only you can do?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

It had trendy fonts, bold colors, and a sharp tagline. It looked impressive, and I know how much work that takes (I recently revamped my own site). The problem was that their actual coaching presence felt hollow.

They’d been sold the idea that branding comes first.

Harsh truth: You can’t market your way out of average coaching.

I know, because I tried.

Early in my career, I thought visibility was the only answer. I showed up everywhere and spread my thought leadership content.

Credibility is important, but I wasn’t asking for referrals or following up with past clients. I was doing half of the work and stopping midstream. I had no system for building the foundations of my business.

Over the years, I’ve watched many coaches hit that same wall.

They have great intentions and solid skills, but they struggle to build their reputation.

The ones who stand out keep improving their craft through ongoing supervision and professional development.

“Meh” coaching

The new world of social media marketing tells us to post more and funnel harder.

The problem here is that if clients leave your sessions feeling “meh” instead of moved, no landing page will save you.

Referrals come from those who feel truly seen in your sessions.

The branding matters less than the service and experience you provide.

Building a pipeline

Before I understood all this, I didn’t ask for referrals or collect testimonials nearly enough.

I didn’t understand how essential those simple follow-ups were, or how much they support every other marketing effort.

This is what I know now:

• Ask for referrals: Don’t assume they’ll appear on their own.

• Follow up: Collect testimonials that speak to the impact you’ve made.

• Invest in your craft: Use supervision and continuing development to upgrade your offer.

I built my credibility through speaking, publishing, and volunteer board work long before I invested in marketing.

Looking back, I wish I’d started this process sooner. Building expertise and visibility together creates momentum you can’t fake. When coaches ask how to grow, I don’t start with marketing tactics.

I ask:

“Would you sign your name next to every client session you’ve had this week?”

If the answer is no, or even a moment of hesitation, that’s your signal.

Prioritize craft first, and the brand will follow. When your coaching is unforgettable, the pipeline builds itself.

Clients return, and they bring their friends and colleagues with them.

Before your next marketing brainstorm, pause and sit with these questions.

Where are you tempted to polish the image before tending to the work?

What is one skill-building move you’ve been putting off?

Reply and tell me what surfaced for you. I read every message, and I love hearing how other career coaches operate.

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

For the career practitioners I speak to, their schedule is intense. It’s a mix of client sessions, admin, emails, and a personal brand that never gets enough attention.

I know that pattern well.

For years, I ran on to-do lists and good intentions. Then the irony became impossible to ignore. I was guiding clients toward purposeful goal-setting, while operating on reaction rather than design.

Time management is essential for career coaching clients.

Without it, a job search or career transition tends to become a stop-start process with outcomes nobody can predict.

A professional responsibility

There is a version of time management that is purely about output. This means doing more in fewer hours.

It’s useful, but it’s not the whole picture. Intentional time management is about arranging your calendar around the actions that strengthen your capability as a coach. When we make time with purpose, we model what healthy professional boundaries really look like.

We also protect our capacity to think clearly, stay current, and coach well over the long term.

Without that structure, even skilled coaches can find themselves reactive and worn thin.

The big four

The following elements are the basis of my ongoing development. They’re essential for defining exactly what should be at the top of your to-do list.

1. Learning

Clients expect us to stay current on labor market trends, new tools, and evolving coaching practices. That does not happen without deliberate time carved out for it.

Even one focused hour each day compounds significantly over months. That time might go toward a new coaching framework, or learning from other professionals sharing insights in your field.

Consistent learning keeps your coaching relevant and grounded.

2. Personal branding

It’s easy to keep deferring this one. “I’ll post next week” has a way of becoming months of silence.

Being visible builds credibility. If we encourage clients to build a strong professional presence, we need to maintain one ourselves. This does not mean posting every day. A single thoughtful post, or sharing a resource you found genuinely useful both count as consistent activity.

3. Outreach and relationships

Whether you call it networking, pipeline building, or simply staying in touch, it all comes down to human connection.

The relationships you invest in keep your practice sustainable and your opportunities alive.

4. Reflection

This is the one I am still actively working on, and I suspect I am not alone in that.

Year-end reviews are common, but daily or weekly reflection is where the real recalibration happens. Even five minutes to note what worked or what you want to carry forward, can restore your focus and keep you connected to your larger goals.

Modeling the standard

For me, time management is ultimately a question of professional integrity.

If we want to help clients build careers that feel purposeful and well-directed, we have to demonstrate what that looks like in our own practice.

Our growth matters as much as theirs does. The hours you protect for learning, reflection, and visibility may not produce immediate results. It’s over time that they will compound in ways that eventually become obvious to everyone around you.

There will always be more client needs or another new task that feels urgent. That is precisely why this approach matters.

What are you doing to improve your own time management this week?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

Memories of the event got under my skin and stayed there. I walked away convinced I probably had no business standing in front of a room again. I made the decision to stop.

When invitations came in, I had a ready rotation of polite excuses.

I’d say I was too busy that week, or that the topic wasn’t really my expertise.

Truth is, I didn’t want to feel that exposed again. I told myself it was fine, that speaking was never really my thing.

The longer I stepped back, the narrower my world became.

Ignoring the instinctive “No”

Last year, a keynote invitation landed in my inbox.

My immediate instinct was to decline, and I actually started drafting the email. Then I read the topic: teaching students how to build connections across every stage of their career. That hit differently.

I care deeply about helping people understand the value of connection.

Especially among young people who may not have access to the same networks and opportunities as others. Turning that down felt like the wrong call.

I agreed, and the anxiety followed immediately.

I had not spoken at that level in years, and all my old doubts resurfaced.

What if I repeated the same experience?

What if the nerves were visible to everyone in the room?

I prepared thoroughly this time. Approximately 40 hours of work for a one-hour talk. I ran through it 20 times and by the end, I was tired of my own voice.

When the day arrived, all that preparation made itself known in the best possible way.

The power of repetition

When you have worked through something that many times, it stops feeling like a performance.

My speech became like a conversation I’d already had, with people I genuinely wanted to help.

Afterward, several attendees told me the talk made them reflect deeply on their own networking habits. That response stayed with me. I realized the whole experience had nothing to do with being a polished or captivating speaker.

Offering something genuinely useful that could help people move forward in their careers was the true purpose.

Higher standards

Professionally, my goal has never been to be the most compelling person in the room. I prefer to simply offer something that helps people do their work better than before.

If there is something you have been avoiding because it once made you feel small or uncertain, it may be worth a second look.

What is one thing you have been putting off that you’d love to achieve?

Heather Maietta
The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

One person walks in wanting a clear action plan.

Another needs space to work out what they actually want before any plan makes sense.

A third is carrying something heavier than a job search, grief over a redundancy, a crisis of professional identity, or a level of anxiety that a coaching conversation cannot address on its own.

Responding to all three in the same way produces the same result: a session that feels fine but does not move anyone forward.

The coaches who consistently produce good outcomes read what a client needs in a given moment and adjust accordingly, relative to their capacity and qualifications.

That requires a clear understanding of three distinct modes of career support.

The Coaching Mode

Coaching is the foundation of the work.

It operates from the premise that the client already holds most of what they need: they require skilled questioning, structured reflection, and the right conditions to arrive at their own clarity. The coach’s role is to facilitate that process, not to direct it.

This mode works particularly well when a client is working through questions of direction, meaning, or confidence.

Powerful questions do the heavy lifting here.

• What matters most to you about this decision?

• Where do you feel the most resistance, and what do you think that is telling you?

• What would a good outcome actually look like?

These questions build agency, and agency is what sustains progress beyond the coaching engagement itself.

The Consulting mode

Consulting has a place in career coaching, but it requires an invitation.

There are moments when a client genuinely lacks information: they have never written a professional resume before, they do not understand how a particular hiring process works, or they want feedback on how their LinkedIn profile is likely to land.

In those moments, sharing expertise is the most useful thing a coach can do.

The critical practice here is asking for permission before shifting into an advisory role. Phrases like “I have some thoughts on this if you’d find them useful” or “Would it help if I shared what tends to work in situations like this?” keep the client in control of the conversation.

Offering a perspective is completely different from prescribing one, and clients feel that distinction clearly.

Knowing When to Refer Out

Some clients bring concerns into the coaching space that belong in a therapeutic one.

A coach working with someone who is experiencing significant grief, prolonged anxiety, or deep psychological distress is operating outside the boundaries of the profession if they try to work through those issues directly.

Recognising that moment and making a considered referral is a mark of professional confidence, not limitation.

The client is better served by the right kind of help than by a well-intentioned coach working beyond their scope.

Putting it Together

Imagine your client is a 38-year-old former teacher exploring a career change.

A coach might open in coaching mode, asking what parts of teaching energised her most and what she hopes to carry forward. Once she has identified that mentoring and leading teams were central to her satisfaction, the conversation might stall at the practical level: she has no clear picture of where those strengths fit outside education.

With her permission, the coach shifts into consulting mode and shares a few sectors where that profile tends to land well.

The client leaves with both self-knowledge and a practical direction.

Neither mode alone would have produced that result.

Used together, with the coach reading the room and shifting deliberately, they gave the client exactly what she needed.

Heather Maietta

The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

The differentiating factor is rarely technique, but how well each coach understands the specific human sitting in front of them.

Context is the information that sits underneath a client’s initial request.

A 25-year-old asking for help with their resume has a different set of pressures than a 45-year-old returning from a career break, who has a different set again from a 60-year-old trying to communicate decades of experience to a hiring manager half their age.

When a coach skips past that context and moves straight to strategy, they often end up solving the wrong problem.

Start With the Story, Not the Strategy

Before opening a resume template or workshopping a LinkedIn headline, slow down and listen.

Every career decision a client has ever made sits inside a bigger life narrative. The coach’s job is to understand that narrative well enough to help the client make sense of it themselves.

Examples of good questions to ask include:

• What brought you here at this particular point?

• What has worked for you in the past, and what has tended to hold you back?

• What are you hoping looks different six months from now?

These questions show the client that their full story is relevant, and they often reveal a concern that the client’s opening request had not captured.

Consider a mother returning to work after several years raising children.

She arrives asking for resume help. In the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that her real concern is whether her skills still have currency. The practical help she asked for matters, but the coaching she actually needs centres on professional value and self-perception.

A coach who only heard the first request would miss that entirely.

Adjust for Where the Client Is in Their Career

Career stage shapes everything: what a client fears, what they want, how they describe themselves, and what they need to hear.

A younger client in the early stages of their career often needs support learning to articulate their value and build confidence in professional settings.

A mid-career client in their thirties or forties is frequently working through a reassessment of priorities, whether that means seeking more meaning, more flexibility, or a meaningful change in direction.

An older client may be navigating age bias, questioning how to frame a long tenure with a single employer, or wondering how to remain relevant in a job market that looks very different from when they last searched.

The trap coaches fall into at each stage is assumption.

Seniority does not guarantee clarity, and youth does not equal aimlessness. The client’s goals and circumstances should guide the work, not the decade they were born in.

Bridge the Gap Between Personal Value and Market Demand

Once the story is understood and the life stage is clear, the work moves to alignment.

Help clients describe what they offer in terms of problems they solve, rather than titles they have held.

Look at their current professional narrative alongside real job descriptions and identify where the language needs updating.

Many clients carry an outdated version of themselves into the job market, because they have never been helped to reframe them for where the market is today.

This is where context-led coaching produces results that generic advice cannot.

When a coach understands who a client is, where they have come from, and what they are genuinely trying to build, the guidance becomes specific enough to actually move them forward.

The story of your client matters, and so does the specific context of their career to date.

The ability to hold all of it at once, and still produce a practical path forward, is what separates coaches who get results from those who coast through sessions.

Heather Maietta

The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

Back then, the platform felt like an experiment.

Nobody quite knew what to do with it. What I could not have predicted was that the person I connected with first would still be a meaningful presence in my professional life today.

Kristy is a health coach now. When we first connected, she was working in marketing consultancy. There have been quiet spells over the years, sometimes long ones, but whenever we reconnect the rapport is immediate.

She offers the kind of honest perspective that goes well beyond encouragement. I hope I’ve offered her something similar.

That relationship, more than any conference or intentional outreach campaign, shaped how I think about professional networks. Most people treat their network as a resource to activate when they need something. The professionals who build lasting careers treat it as something worth tending to regardless of immediate need.

As career coaches, your clients need to understand this distinction, because the value of a well-developed network reaches far beyond job searching.

It can be a source of renewed energy, unexpected opportunity, and real career momentum. To help clients grasp that, it helps to name what a meaningful professional network actually looks like.

The Long-Term Contact

Every career has people woven through multiple chapters of it.

These are the professionals who knew you when you were earlier in your journey, before the experience, the seniority, and the self-assurance you carry today. Some of them hold a perspective on your career that you have long since lost the ability to see yourself.

Relationships like this carry a particular kind of weight.

They have accumulated context that makes them reliable in ways newer connections simply cannot replicate. A long-term contact understands the significance of a particular moment in your career because they watched the road that led to it.

This kind of relationship is also low-maintenance by nature. It persists through periods of no contact and reactivates without effort.

It is built not through frequency but through genuine character, showing up consistently and being someone whose presence in another person’s life has always added something real.

It is worth helping your clients identify these people in their own network.

The Connector

Some professional relationships arrive exactly when a career needs redirecting.

These are the people who appear at the right moment and introduce a possibility that was previously out of reach.

The connector may have little professional overlap with your client’s background.

Their value comes from access, an introduction, a referral, a perspective from a different field that reframes a problem. Career coaches see this constantly. A client puts considerable effort into applications and refining documents, and then one conversation with the right person moves things faster than weeks of solo effort.

The connector often comes from an unexpected direction: a former colleague who has since moved into a different sector, someone met briefly at an industry event, a mutual contact who makes an offhand introduction.

What makes these relationships worth cultivating is precisely that their value is unpredictable.

Encourage your clients to invest in them early, before there is anything obvious to gain.

The Peer Who Gets It

There is a particular kind of professional relationship that offers something the others cannot: the experience of being fully understood by someone working through the same terrain.

A peer at a similar career stage, dealing with comparable challenges and working toward goals that echo your own, offers a form of support that is genuinely mutual. The learning goes in both directions. These relationships have staying power because the people in them grow together, rather than one person holding most of the knowledge or experience.

Their value is often most felt in small, ongoing ways.

A peer who can say honestly that they are also figuring things out removes the isolation that comes with ambiguous professional situations. The answers do not always come directly, but the shared thinking tends to produce clarity over time.

When supporting your clients through a career transition, they might benefit from speaking to someone who has already forged the path they seek to attain. These connections can often offer a different perspective to your coaching.

The Foundation Underneath All of It

What each of these relationship types demands is the same: investment before it is needed, and genuine interest in the other person’s path.

My connection with Kristy has outlasted any number of professionally strategic relationships I tended to carefully over the years. It has lasted because the interest was real.

When we catch up, there is no re-establishing of rapport. It resumes naturally because the foundation was laid with something authentic.

Helping clients build a network worth having is part of what good career coaching looks like.

The practical place to start is ask your clients which of these three relationship types they currently have, and which ones they have been neglecting.

Heather Maietta

The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

A polished resume, a firm handshake, the ability to show up on time and do the job described. For decades, that formula worked.

Today, it’s barely enough to get a phone screen.

The world of work has changed faster than most career advice has caught up with. AI is reshaping how tasks get done, hiring processes have grown more complex and inconsistent, and job roles shift almost as fast as they’re created. Clients who come to career coaches now aren’t just struggling to get hired, but struggling to understand what being hire-ready even means in this environment.

Employability Is a Full Skills Ecosystem

The job market no longer rewards any single category of skill in isolation. What employers are looking for is a combination of three distinct skill types working together.

Technical skills cover the tools, platforms, and processes a candidate can use, including AI-assisted tools like ChatGPT, automated scheduling systems, and data dashboards. Many candidates are either behind the curve on these or intimidated by them, which creates a real gap between what they offer and what hiring teams expect.

Transferable skills include project management, cross-functional collaboration, and written communication: the kind of capabilities that travel well across industries and roles.

Self-management skills are often the most overlooked category: adaptability, initiative, and emotional intelligence. These are the skills that determine whether someone can handle a role that keeps evolving, a team that’s still finding its footing, or a hiring process that doesn’t give them much to work with.

The job of a career coach is to help them connect what they know how to do with what the market is actively looking for, and to articulate that connection clearly.

Four Changes That Are Redefining the Hiring Landscape

Job roles are more fluid than ever.

With AI taking on more defined tasks, many job descriptions have become vague by design. Employers want problem-solvers who can adapt, not candidates who recite a list of past responsibilities.

Hiring processes are complex and inconsistent.

Multiple interview rounds, unpaid skills assessments, and unclear timelines are now standard. Clients need help staying focused and resilient through a process that often gives them very little feedback.

AI competence is now a baseline expectation.

Employers increasingly want candidates who can work alongside automation, not just alongside colleagues.

Early success matters as much as credentials.

New hires are expected to self-navigate, deliver results quickly, and integrate into team culture without a long runway. That expectation is now part of what employability means, and most clients aren’t preparing for it.

What This Means for Career Coaches

When clients arrive burned out from job boards, convinced something is wrong with them, they don’t need another pep talk.

In fact, they have probably heard that a million times already. As coaches, it is much more effective for us to provide our clients with a clear framework for understanding what the market is asking for and how to communicate their value within it.

A client who learns to frame their freelance work as strategic project experience can land a role that values innovation.

A client who understands how to tell structured stories in interviews can go from silence to “you’re exactly who we need.”

The shift is rarely about doing more, but understanding what the market sees and giving it a reason to pay attention.

That’s the foundation of modern employability coaching.

The coaches who grasp this concept are helping clients build careers that last.

Heather Maietta

The Coach for Career Coaches

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

I’ve worked with hundreds of career coaches through my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) and Continuing Education programs. I’ve supported coaches one-on-one as they built stronger practices, handled tougher client situations, and grew into their own style.

I’m proud of the work I’ve built.

And I still get stuck.

When that happens, the thing that helps most is almost never another book, another course, or another tool. It’s usually a conversation with another coach who can see what I cannot.

I want to talk about that because I think too many career coaches are doing hard work in isolation and calling that normal.

Career coaching can get lonely

This work can be deeply rewarding. It can also get quiet in ways people outside the field do not always understand.

You spend hours holding a client’s frustration, hope, grief, confusion, or fear. Then the session ends, you close the laptop, and there is no staff room to walk into. No hallway conversation. No colleague who heard the session and can help you sort out what happened.

A lot of career coaches work alone.

Some run solo practices. Some are the only career person inside a college, workforce program, nonprofit, or agency that is already stretched thin. Some are technically on a team and still feel like they are carrying the emotional and strategic load by themselves.

That kind of setup creates blind spots.

Not because you are doing anything wrong. Because no one sees clearly all the time when they are deep in the work.

The problem with “client blinders”

I have a name for this.

Client blinders.

It happens when you get so immersed in a coaching relationship that your view starts to narrow. You begin to absorb the client’s pace, their assumptions, and their story about what the problem is. You replay the session later. You wonder whether you missed something. You try to solve it from six angles and still feel like you are circling the same issue.

I did this a lot earlier in my career.

At the time, I thought carrying that weight proved I cared.

What it really proved was that I needed a mirror.

A few years ago, I was working with a client who kept stalling on networking outreach. Every session, I tried a different coaching move. I reframed it. I made the task smaller. I assigned one tiny action. Still nothing changed.

Then I mentioned the case to a coach I trust.

She said, “Heather, you’re solving the wrong problem. Networking isn’t the issue. She’s grieving her old work identity, and you keep skipping past it.”

She was right.

I had been so focused on the tactic that I missed the emotion underneath it. That 10-minute conversation saved me weeks of spinning. More important, it helped me give the client what she actually needed.

I would not have gotten there alone.

Why peer learning changes your practice

There is a kind of professional growth that only happens when another experienced coach reflects something back to you.

A podcast cannot do that.

A certification cannot do that on its own.

A LinkedIn post cannot do that.

You need another human being who understands the work, who will be honest with you, and who has enough distance from your client to see the whole picture.

That is one reason peer learning matters so much.

It helps you challenge your assumptions before they harden into habits. It gives you language for what you are noticing but have not yet named. It helps you stay curious instead of defaulting to the same intervention every time a familiar issue shows up.

According to the International Coaching Federation’s 2023 Global Coaching Study, coaches who participate in regular peer supervision report higher satisfaction with their practice and stronger client outcomes. That tracks with what I’ve seen over two decades.

The coaches who grow fastest usually have other people in the room with them, metaphorically speaking.

They let trusted peers question their thinking. They stay open to feedback. They resist the urge to go it alone just because they can.

Why experienced coaches still need support

I also want to name something uncomfortable.

Many of us got into coaching because we are good at helping other people. We are often much less practiced at asking for help ourselves.

We tell clients to build support systems. We tell them not to figure everything out alone. We tell them community matters when the process gets heavy.

Then we go home and try to carry our own work in silence.

I’ve watched this wear coaches down over time.

Not always in dramatic ways. Sometimes the signs are quieter than that. Sessions get flatter. Curiosity starts to fade. A coach who used to listen for nuance starts reaching for the same advice too quickly. They stop stretching themselves because they are tired, and then the tiredness starts shaping the quality of the work.

That pattern is common. It is also reversible.

Fresh thinking often returns when another coach steps in with a question you had not thought to ask.

What useful coaching community actually looks like

Not every professional community creates that kind of growth.

Free Facebook groups can be helpful. Open LinkedIn threads can spark ideas. There is a place for broad professional conversation.

What they usually do not create is depth.

When there is no real commitment, people drift in and out. The conversation stays surface-level. You get encouragement. You might get a quick tip. You do not often get the kind of honest, specific reflection that changes how you coach on Tuesday afternoon with a real client.

The communities that have mattered most in my own career have been smaller and more intentional.

They were full of people who showed up consistently. People who were willing to say, “I don’t think that approach is working, and here’s why.” People who shared anonymized case examples. People who were willing to look at their own assumptions instead of only showcasing wins.

That kind of space takes trust.

And trust usually takes commitment.

What this means for career coaches right now

If you are a career coach doing thoughtful work and feeling stuck, isolated, or dulled by carrying too much alone, I want to say this plainly:

That does not mean you are bad at your job.

It may mean you need more mirrors around your work.

You may need a space where you can bring a messy case, a hard question, a pattern you cannot quite read, or a moment where you are doubting yourself and hear another experienced coach say, “Here’s what I think you’re missing.”

That is not dependency.

That is professional practice.

Heather

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.

I was scrolling LinkedIn recently and came across a conversation between Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s CEO, and Aneesh Raman, the company’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, about how to become “irreplaceable in the age of AI.”

It was thoughtful, polished, and was exactly the kind of content professionals are supposed to stop and read.

I kept thinking: most clients would never make it past the second paragraph. Not because they’re careless. Because they’re in the middle of a very different emotional reality.

They’re deep in a rejection cycle. They’re 3 weeks into silence from an employer who told them they were a strong candidate. They’re staring at LinkedIn Jobs or Indeed at 11 p.m., wondering whether the market has quietly moved on without them.

That’s the context career coaches are working in every day.

So when I read a leadership conversation about becoming “irreplaceable,” I don’t just think about the idea. I think about how to translate it into something a client can actually use in session.

That’s where this got interesting.

The 5 qualities worth paying attention to

The LinkedIn conversation centered on 5 qualities: courage, curiosity, creativity, communication, and compassion.

That list lines up almost perfectly with the coaching work many of us are already doing.

We just use different language for it.

Career coach’s promote courage when they help a client stop saying, “I’ll take anything,” and start naming what they actually want.

They coach curiosity when they help someone get out of apply-and-wait mode and start researching teams, industries, and decision-makers again.

They coach communication when we move a client from a vague line like “I’m a team player with strong leadership skills” to something concrete like, “I rebuilt onboarding for a 40-person department and cut ramp-up time from 12 weeks to 6 weeks.”

That shift matters.

The AI conversation gives career coaches a useful frame for work we’re already doing. It helps clients see that their value is not limited to task execution. A lot of their value sits in how they think, how they relate, how they decide, and how they respond when the situation is messy.

That is much harder to automate.

A practical exercise for coaching clients through AI fear

One part of the LinkedIn piece stood out because it translates well into a career coaching session.

The exercise is simple: focus on tasks, not titles.

Here’s how I’d use it with a client.

Set aside 15 minutes and ask them to list the core tasks from their most recent role. Write down everything they actually did, not just what sat in the job description.

Then sort those tasks into 3 columns:

• tasks AI could likely handle on its own

• tasks AI could support or speed up

• tasks that still require a human being in the room

That sorting conversation is often more powerful than clients expect.

The human column usually fills up fast.

Judgment calls. Relationship-building. Reading a room. Handling conflict. Explaining something complex to a non-expert. Navigating ambiguity. Earning trust. Knowing when a process is technically correct but likely to fail with real people.

Those are not side skills.

For many clients, those are the job.

And when they see that on paper, something shifts.

I’ve watched clients go from “I don’t know what I bring anymore” to “Wait, most of what I do still depends on me” in the span of one conversation.

That’s not hype. That’s perspective.

Why this matters so much for Gen X clients

This lands especially hard with Gen X clients, and I say that as someone in that demographic.

They may have 10 to 15 years left in the workforce. They’ve built deep expertise. They’ve managed teams, solved problems, handled conflict, made decisions under pressure, and learned how to work across personalities and politics.

They also tend to carry a specific kind of tech anxiety.

Many of them remember earlier workplace shifts clearly. Email changed how offices ran. Digital tools changed communication. Entire functions got reorganized. So when AI enters the conversation, it can trigger a very old fear: maybe this is the moment the market decides I’m outdated.

That fear is real.

A coach can help them see the other side of the story.

Years of accumulated judgment still matter. Pattern recognition matters. Knowing how to handle a tough conversation matters. Knowing how to spot risk, calm a tense meeting, or make a call without perfect information matters.

Those are not leftovers from an earlier career stage. They are high-value skills.

Clients in their late 40s and 50s often need help naming that again.

Why younger clients need a different version of the conversation

For clients in their 20s and 30s, the challenge is usually different.

They are often more comfortable experimenting with ChatGPT, LinkedIn, Google Gemini, or Claude. Their concern is not always fear of the tool. Sometimes it’s overestimating what the tool can do and underestimating the human skill they are still building.

A younger client may use AI fluently and still struggle to recognize their own judgment as a professional asset.

They may not yet see that knowing how to read a manager, navigate tension on a team, recover from a mistake, or tailor a message to a skeptical stakeholder is a real skill. Those abilities often become visible only after enough experience.

That is why the coaching conversation matters.

You are helping clients identify the human part of their work before the market teaches them the hard way.

You do not need to become an AI trainer overnight

I want to say this clearly for coaches who feel pressure to become instant AI experts.

You do not need to teach prompt engineering.

You do not need to demo ChatGPT in every session.

You do not need to turn coaching into a software tutorial.

Your job is to help clients understand where they stand in relation to AI, what parts of their work are changing, and what parts still depend on judgment, presence, and trust.

That is a coaching conversation.

Susan David’s work on emotional agility is useful here too. When clients feel threatened by change, one of the most useful things you can do is help them name the emotion, stay with it long enough to think clearly, and then look at the evidence.

And the evidence usually shows they have more staying power than they think.

This exercise is worth doing on your own work too

I did this exercise with my own coaching practice last month.

About 80% of what I do in a session still requires being present with another human being, responding to their energy, noticing what they are not saying, asking the question they did not know they needed, and helping them think more clearly in real time.

AI can help me prep. It can help me draft a worksheet. It can help me organize ideas.

The actual coaching stays mine.

The same is true for you.

That matters because career coaches are navigating the same anxiety many clients feel. We are reading the same headlines. We are hearing the same claims about what AI will replace. We are trying to decide what we need to learn, what we can ignore, and where we still offer something tools cannot.

That is worth naming honestly.

What career coaches can teach clients right now

If you want to turn this into something practical this week, start here:

Ask clients to inventory their real work.

Help them separate tasks from titles.

Help them identify where human judgment still drives results.

Help them see communication, trust, discernment, conflict management, and adaptability as business value, not personality traits.

And when fear shows up, help them look at the evidence before they decide they are becoming obsolete.

That is useful coaching.

The world of work is changing. Clients feel it even when they cannot explain it clearly.

Career coaches are the people who help them name what is happening, understand what still matters, and keep moving with more confidence.

That is work worth doing.

Until next week,
Heather

Heather Maietta is a former career coach and a certified Facilitating Career Development (FCD) instructor who helps career practitioners build stronger coaching skills and professional credibility. She delivers FCD training and Continuing Education (CE) courses for career coaches, career counselors, and other career development professionals. Visit her website to learn more about her programs, training, and resources for career practitioners.