Frank Wood's Page

Hi Frank,

Thank you for providing a bit more information. The process I often go through when career coaching individals follows a structure along the lines of:
1. Contracting - using platform building questions do determine what they want (job? career change? personal sense of achievement? getting their spouse off their back etc), what the benefits would be and what they've found helpful in the past when they have been in a similar situation (i.e. job seeking, coping with unemployement etc)
2. Exploring - what do they already know about what they're good at? what they enjoy? what's important to them? building off their own reflection as well as feedback from others in performance reviews etc
3. Visioning - can take a number of forms but possibilities include future perfect type questions to discuss ideal job or life in 12 months time or miracle happens overnight and all problems are solved. An alternative is scaling to determine where they are now in terms of overall/job satisfaction to identify some short term goals. Yet another alternative is to look at all the resources they identified in the expoloring phase and discuss what jobs they are aware of that satisfy/use those.
4. Action - what small steps can they take to move forward? (research, further reflection/exploration, networking etc)

As with all things you can use a variety of activities/interventions at each of these stages depending on the situation.

In terms of books that might be helpful I would recommend "Career Counselling" by Robert Nathan and Linda Hill and "How to get a job you'll love" and "Take control of your career" by John Lees. They are not written with SF in mind but a lot of what they write is complementary.

I hope thats helpful. Please let me know if you'd like to discuss further.

Best wishes
Antoinette