Evolving your Career Practice in a Changing World

30/01/20

For around 20 years, Heidi Winney has been coaching clients in how to navigate their careers and has been invited to present the topic of career management and decision-making at many seminars and conferences.

Allan Gatenby is an internationally accredited career and talent development coach, Fellow of Royal Institute Educators (FRIEdr), Fellow of Royal Institute of Management (FRIM), with a passion for recognising and developing excellence.

Leonie Lam is a career coach, speaker, trainer and HR consultant. She has helped hundreds of people to achieve their career goals, whether it's getting a new job, promotion, or overcoming a challenge in their career.

The world and therefore our context is constantly changing. So, our career practice must also be constantly evolving. Three CDAA practitioners write about how they are evolving their career practice in a changing world: 

Heidi Winney

There is nothing more certain than that change is constant and that it is accelerating! The challenge for me as a career and executive coach is to be well informed of these changes. I read articles from a wide range of sources including HBR, Forbes, McKinsey, am active on LinkedIn, post and comment on articles, listen to and read the national and international media. This helps me be informed of what is happening globally as well as locally as some of my clients are international clients and my focus must also be on the global environment.

I follow international organisations such as Career Thought Leaders, WBECS, listen to podcasts, attend webinars and PD events through the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership, the CDAA, AIM, the Association for Coaching, etc. This allows me to learn from experts and share insights and knowledge with others in my profession.

Discussing and debriefing my clients’ experiences during the hiring process ensures that I am up-to-date with recruitment and interview practices and then allows me to brief clients on what to expect. There have been significant changes during the last few years in hiring practices and interview styles, ie the increasing use of case and/or presentation style interviews, digital interviews, and behavioural and traditional interview questions. Much of my time is spent in coaching clients in developing effective networking strategies and in how to have conversations and uncover opportunities.

LinkedIn has greatly changed the employment landscape. Individuals and particularly executives need to know how to market themselves digitally and need to be active on LinkedIn. I coach my clients in how to have an impactful presence on LinkedIn as well as in developing their marketing collateral to best demonstrate their value proposition.

As we would say to our clients – constant lifelong learning is essential in today’s world of work.

Allan Gatenby

As career and life-design professionals, change is our greatest ally. Indeed, without a rapidly changing world our profession would be entirely different. Sadly, the human response has been to fear change rather than embrace it and to assume predictability brings happiness. As life-design professionals, we cannot accept anything other than the constancy of change; embrace it; model agility and become innovative, creative and entrepreneurial in our own practice.

There is no one way to do anything. Indeed, if our message, intended or implied is that, then we are setting our clients up for failure. Growth grows from self-knowledge and self-actualising. Diversity, creativity, risk-taking and renewal are elements for success in a rapidly changing world. Look, listen learn and act is a mantra for growth.

Our profession is rich. Professional practice diverse. Creativity and innovation are around us. Our CDAA family is a source of inspiration in rapidly changing times.

Leonie Lam

In the beginning of 2019, I had reached my 9th year in my career coaching business and one of the changes that I was personally experiencing was the lack of connection in my business. What do I mean by this? Being a sole trader, working on my own meant that I was in and out of meetings with clients at cafes or in the office, working from home, working on client sites. I rarely worked in a team environment and the entrepreneurial experience is something that most of my family and friends were unable to connect with.

After speaking to an associate one day in January 2019, she said, “Why don’t you create a network group of career coaches who have their own practice, so you can stay connected and bounce ideas off each other?” What a wonderful idea and I started to ask the career coaches that I worked closely with to see if they were interested. I then created my own small master mind group called the Creative Careers Entrepreneurs (CCE). In 2019, we had 5 successful meetings online and then followed by our Christmas dinner in December 2019 in which we celebrated our profound year together.

By being in this group, I dealt with the change I was struggling with and more importantly, it also gave me the opportunity to work on my professional development every 2 months. We shared our own learnings, our setbacks and best practices on how we work with our clients. It is one of the best networks I have created in my life to work with likeminded people with the same values and purpose in life.

Come, look, listen, learn more from these practitioners at our upcoming event in Sydney and consider how you embrace change and grow your practice.