Executive career advice – The Benefits of career coaching.

This is a career coaching case study from one of our recent CFO clients. We asked a few questions about his experiences of working with us as well as the perceived benefits of career coaching, and his answers follow:

The challenges I was experiencing related to a previous job move into financial services which was outside of my main industry sector experience in utilities/ infrastructure (albeit still as CFO). Also the company had faced a number of challenges. Furthermore, age – at comfortably the wrong side of 50 – was not on my side.

I decided that I needed professional help and moral support which were provided at reasonable cost by Executive Connexions. I had previously benefitted some years back from a comprehensive employer funded outplacement service and what I needed this time around was more of a refresher and update, which I needed to fund myself.

The coaching provided the morale boost and steer from an experienced career coach that I needed to set me up for success.

I have learned that that I am more resilient and persistent than I thought, and that whilst you can perfect your approach and preparations you are dependent to a degree on some luck as to what roles come up when you need them (editor’s note: since this time we have introduced our Be Found program, which focuses on helping executives learn new skills to help them attract opportunities to them).

My direct coaching experience was that I was very much advised to ‘stick to the knitting’ and focus hard on the sweet spot, in my case being CFO of infrastructure services.

I am now about to start a role as CFO of RATP Dev UK. RATP Group are one of the largest urban transport operators in the world.

My top piece of advice to other executive job seeking colleagues is to be patient and use the time to prepare and research effectively. Every interview is slightly different and get loads under your belt with as much feedback as possible c. 20 would be good prep.

Many thanks to our client for supplying these words (we know you’re thriving in the new role, so keep up the good work!) and demonstrating some of the many benefits of career coaching. If you’d like to explore how we might help you in your career drop me a line at [email protected]