Career Coaching in Milton Keynes

Three Different Questions Get Called Career Coaching

Worth sorting out which one you have, because they need different work and people often book the wrong one.

I know what I want and I cannot seem to get there. The shortest piece of work. Usually it turns out there is one conversation you have been avoiding, or one assumption nobody has tested.

I have no idea what I want. Longer, and more interesting. Most people in this group can describe what they do not want in great detail, which is more information than it feels like.

I cannot stand it any more. This one needs care, because sometimes it is a career problem and sometimes it is not. See the next section.

The Version That Is Not About Your Job

A fair number of people who book career coaching do not need career coaching.

When somebody is exhausted, flat, dreading Monday and certain the answer is a different job, the job is sometimes the problem. Often it is what is making the problem visible. Change the job with that still running underneath and you get about four months of relief before the same feeling arrives in the new building.

I would rather find that out with you in the first session than in month six. If it turns out to be stress and burnout or low mood, we do that instead, and I can do that because I am a psychotherapist as well as a coach. A coach without clinical training will build you an action plan on top of it, and it will not hold.

That is not me steering you into therapy. It is the opposite. It is the thing you cannot get from somebody who only has one tool. There is more on why that matters, and on how unregulated coaching is in this country, on the personal development coaching page.

I Did This Myself, at Forty-Five

Twenty years in corporate leadership, and then I went back to university and trained as a counsellor while I carried on working.

I am telling you that because of what it lets me say honestly rather than as a qualification. It took years, part time, around a job. There was a long stretch where it was expensive, tiring and not obviously working. Most of the people who tell you to make the leap have either never done it or did it with a financial cushion they are not mentioning.

What I will not do is tell you that you are too old, because I do not believe that and I have the boring evidence of my own week. What I also will not do is pretend the sums do not matter.

If It Was Not Your Choice

Redundancy is a different shape from a career change, and treating it as the same thing is why a lot of support for it lands badly.

A career change is a decision. Redundancy is a loss, and it usually arrives with a dent in how you see yourself that has nothing to do with your CV. People skip that part and go straight to applications, then cannot understand why the applications feel so heavy.

The practical work still happens. It just works better once the other bit has been said out loud to somebody.

What the Work Actually Looks Like

We start with what you would do if the money and the opinions were not in the room, which usually takes longer to answer than people expect. Then the constraints go back in one at a time, because that is where the useful thinking happens rather than in the fantasy version.

Then something specific before the next session. A conversation, a phone call, an hour spent finding out what a job actually involves rather than what you imagine it involves. Career thinking done entirely in your own head tends to loop.

And then the part that is actually the job: being there in the stretch where the new thing feels wrong and going back feels sensible. That is where most self-directed change quietly ends.

What I Do Not Do

I do not rewrite CVs and I do not do interview drills. There are people who are genuinely good at that and it is a different trade.

I do not administer psychometric tests or personality profiles. Some coaches build their whole offer on one. I would rather ask you questions.

And I will not tell you to follow your passion. It is the most repeated piece of career advice in circulation and it does real damage to people who do not happen to have one obvious passion, which is most people.

What the Evidence Says, and What I Could Not Find

Coaching in general has a reasonable evidence base, and it is strongest at exactly the thing this page is about: deciding what you want and then doing it. The figures and their limits are set out on the coaching page rather than repeated here.

What I looked for and did not find was research specifically on career coaching as an intervention. I am not going to borrow the organisational coaching numbers and let you assume they cover this, which is what most pages on this subject quietly do.

So take the honest version. This is a structured conversation with somebody who has done the thing and will not flatter you. That is worth something. It is not a clinical treatment with a published effect size.

Where and How

In person in Wolverton, within reach of Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Bletchley and Woburn Sands, or online anywhere in the UK. Coaching works well on a screen, so if evenings are the only realistic slot, say so.

This sits under coaching for life and business. If the question is about a role you have grown into rather than which role you want, that is executive coaching, and it is a different conversation.

You can read what happens in a first session before committing to anything.