It is often the case that those who seek out executive career guidance do so because of a significant or imminent event in their career, such as an unexpected period of transition or an upcoming interview. But in reality, no matter where you are in your career, executive career guidance can have a dramatic impact on your career trajectory.

Here are just a few of the ways executive career guidance coaching could advance your career: 

Gaining Clarity and Avoiding a Career Drift

It can sometimes take an outside perspective to help you understand what you have to offer, what your long-term goals are, what you need to forge a more satisfying career and how to build a detailed plan to reach your ultimate ambition. Experienced executive career coaches can help you to identify and work on these key areas to ensure that no time is wasted in reaching your potential. They can even provide vital additional support throughout your transition as you build your path to a successful future.
 

Identifying Your Strategic Career Options and Making a Plan

When juggling a busy executive schedule and the search for new executive opportunities, it can often be a challenge to understand what the most productive use of your time is in order to progress in your career. With proactive job seeker tasks including strategy creation, online and offline networking, building a personal brand, online job searches, fine-tuning your career documents, it can seem a little overwhelming and can be confusing to understand how much time to allocate to each activity. With the help of executive career guidance, your coach can produce a schedule-based plan that fits into your professional life to ensure you are making the most of your energies and move forward in the most efficient way possible. They can then provide additional support and guidance to keep you on track for reaching your goal and redrafting your plan to meet new challenges and stay flexible.
 

Perfecting Your Personal Brand to Increase Your Visibility

To stand out in the highly competitive executive job market, you must be able to distinguish yourself from other candidates with similar experience. Therefore, identifying your strengths, weaknesses, skills and unique value is the cornerstone of any executive job search. It will also help you to better understand which companies to target in your job search based on your leadership style, career ambitions and their potential skills gap. Executive coaches can provide guidance on how to better communicate these strengths to potential employers and recruiters so that your new opportunity will be a perfect fit for you. In addition to this, creating a personal brand can further increase your visibility among the executive search community and can attract more opportunities as a result.
 

Preparing for Interview or Salary Negotiation

Regardless of experience levels, all executives tend to feel a level of nerves when tackling an interview or salary negotiation discussion. But with the help of a professional coach, you can put your best foot forward, knowing that you are fully prepared for whatever lies ahead. Executive career guidance can provide you with practice strategies for success and information on how to structure your responses, how to handle challenging questions and the most compelling ways to tell your executive career success stories during your interview. Salary negotiation coaching can also be provided for those hoping to remain with their present employer with the object of gaining a higher salary without damaging existing relationships, which can be a highly sensitive task.

If you feel like you could benefit from executive career guidance from one of BlueSteps’ world-class professional coaches, contact Executive Director Kathy Simmons at ksimmons@ecareerservices.com.