To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease. Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate, to have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to make the financial commitment and devote the time and energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching is a beneficial way for you to grow and develop.

What can you expect to pay for coaching? Individual coaching fees are $150 per hour and we have many diverse career coaching packages to meet your unique needs.

Career Coaching Is Ideal For Professionals Who:

Are you willing to do the work?  We will give you the tools and work with you one-on-one, but you have to be willing to execute what we teach you in order to be successful.

Are you motivated?  We don't work with individuals who are satisfied with the status quo.  We work with highly enthusiastic professionals who want to take their careers to the next level.

Are you coachable?  Our goal is to teach you the tools that will get you the ideal position at the compensation level you are worth.  You must take our advice and trust the system.  If you do this, the dividends will be great.

Are you dependable?  If you are someone who constantly cancels appointments or can't keep commitments then career coaching probably isn't right for you.

Career coaching is a collaborative and tailored career management process specialized in assisting clients to discover and attain the career or income position that is ideally suited to them. Your Surcorp Career Coach will work with you to identify where you are right now in your career,  elucidate where you want to go, and establish a career management plan to help you reach your professional goals. Career coaching is suitable for individuals in transition, for those wanting help with their job search or for people dissatisfied with their current role.

How does career coaching work?

Unlike therapy, career coaching is short term and goal focused. Career coaching typically begins with a personal interview to assess your current opportunities and challenges, define the scope of our relationship, identify priorities for action, and establish desired outcomes Your career coach will work with you through a diverse formats such as face to face, telephone coaching, and via e-mail. Your career coach will schedule calls in advance and will provide the required structure to keep the process moving forward and on track. For more details on career transition or job search, refer to our services page. We start by discovering what motivates and drives you through the use of the most appropriate tools for you – such as assessments. Your career coach will then determine what changes are necessary in order for you to feel fulfilled with your life work. This may mean a job change, company change, industry change or simply some adjustments to your current position. Lastly, we create a career map to guide you along your quest. As a career coach, we utilize various techniques to help you differentiate yourself in the marketplace so that others can appreciate your unique contributions.

Why hire a career coach?

You hire a coach to achieve your business, career, personal, family and any other type of goals you may want to achieve much more effectively, efficiently, completely, with more fun, and in less time than any other human improvement processes. Coaches assist you to overcome obstacles and fears, focus on solutions, have someone to bounce ideas off, discover how you can improve, accomplish more than you thought possible, and achieve balance in your personal, work and family lives. Professional athletes and top executives stay at the top of their game with the help of a coach. That extra support can make all the difference in the world because you take yourself more seriously. You take more effective and focused actions immediately and stop putting up with what is dragging you down. You create momentum so it's easier to improve your quality of life.

Career Coaching:

Provides a fresh, unique perspective and encouragement

Helps you think out of the box and choose a career that you will succeed at and be a good fit for your skills, values, passions, and work life preferences.

Helps keep the momentum going; stay on course with your action plan

Provides clarity and focus on aspirations, ambitions, and goals

Activates your dreams with an action plan

Pinpoints and navigates through roadblocks

Gives you the shot of encouragement when you need it and celebrates your successes

Finds a new job/career more quickly, saving you money

I live outside of Toronto. How can we work together?

Our career coaches have worked with many clients across the Canada, Europe, the Caribbean and the United States effectively via the telephone, skype, and e-mail. One of the benefits of career coaching is that it eliminates geographical boundaries, offering convenience and flexibility.

How much does career coaching cost?

Each individual comes to coaching with a unique set of issues and areas on which they would like focus. Please visit our services page to review the various package options. You can also select 1 hr career coaching session and add as many as you need. You can call us at 416-361-1290 and we'll review your needs and determine a program that works for you.

Why is career coaching worth so much more than you pay?

The value of the goals you achieve will greatly exceed what you pay for coaching. In fact, coaching clients have found that the value of the goals they achieve through coaching are inevitably priceless. There are also other, hidden benefits of coaching, such as enhanced thinking and decision-making skills, improved productivity, stronger self-confidence and better relationships.

Executive Coaching to Improve Your Career Performance

Many of our executive coaching clients engage Surcorp Executive Coaching for diverse reasons to develop greater people management skills, build a strong organization or gain greater clarity to become more effective.

Some areas of focus for executive coaching:

Strengthening leadership and managerial skills

Building, developing and retaining a successful team

Effective planning and time management

Developing effective communication capabilities

Identifying and aligning your personal values with the organization’s values

Leadership assessments including 360

SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) for you, your department or organization

Developing and executing the organization’s mission statement

Advanced listening and questioning

Understanding the dynamics of change

Understanding the decision-making process

Emotional intelligence competencies

Executive coaching with Surcorp Career Solutions is focused on helping you find your unique work / life balance while guiding you in developing your leadership acumen, management capabilities, communication and presentation skills. Through strategic and results oriented executive coaching, you will learn how to delegate more effectively, manage stress, improve your time management abilities, master your influencing skills and power within your organization.

Executive Coaching can be the key to your long-term success particularly in helping you navigate change and manage new challenges. Your Surcorp Executive Coach the sounding board, partner and outside expert who will consistently ask the tough questions, develop new solutions, share insight, and offer that fresh perspective you need to move both yourself and your organization ahead.

And according to a study done in the UK, 73% of employers would employ a candidate with volunteering experience over one without.

When it comes to internships, employers offered jobs to 70% of their interns according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Links:
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Other comments on the topic from LinkedIn Answers here:
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More on Volunteerism and how it relates to careers:

• · There is a lot of ANECDOTAL evidence that volunteering boosts careers.
• · There is both academic and popular-press research that shows people BELIEVE volunteering is good for careers.
• · The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a good publication about volunteering in general -- demographics, kinds of organizations, employed vs. unemployed volunteers, what volunteers mostly do for organizations, how they got involved, etc.

The same survey finds that an additional 21% of employees today identify themselves as "highly disengaged," a figure which has risen nearly three-fold since 2007.

The CEB finds that companies can apply the following tactics to identify, re-engage, and more effectively manage high-potential employees:

• Stimulate Emerging leaders need challenging work, recognition, and the chance to grow.
• Test Explicitly test candidates for internal promotion for ability, engagement, and aspiration to make sure they're able to handle the tougher roles as their careers progress.
• Manage Having line managers oversee high-potential employees only limits their access to opportunities and encourages hoarding of talent. Instead, manage these high-potential employees at the corporate level.
• Challenge High potential employees need to be in positions where new capabilities can or must be acquired.
• Recognize High potential employees will be more engaged if they are recognized through pay, so offer them differentiated compensation and recognition.
• Engage Incorporate high-potential employees into strategic planning. Share future strategies with them and emphasize their role in making them come to fruition.

The key takeaway here is that if companies don't proactively address high-potential engagement and retention now, they should expect to incur significant recruiting costs related to replacing these individuals. Yet, the opportunity cost of disengagement will exact an even steeper toll on corporate output.

A second take-away: If this is important in managing talent in corporations, how much more important for career professionals to use this knowledge in coaching their executive clients to better performance, or when they are deciding which companies are the best fit for their. (KBs observation)

Source: ExecuNet http://bit.ly/cM5qSs

• · 13 require a bachelor of arts or higher college degree
• · 5 require an associate of arts degree
• · 10 require only a vocational certification or on the job training

Consider this additional data:

• · In 1970, 77 percent of workers with a bachelor's degree were employed in professional and managerial occupations. By 2000, that had fallen to 60 percent.
• · Of the nearly 1 million new jobs created since hiring turned up in January, about half have been temporary census jobs. Most of the rest are concentrated in such industries as retail, hospitality and temporary staffing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• · Twenty-five percent of college seniors this year had a job waiting for them upon graduation, up from one in five last year, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
• · The unemployment rate for college graduates stands at 4.7 percent less 50% of the figure for workers with only a high school diploma.
• · Federal statistics for 2008 show that men 25 and older with a bachelor's degree pulled down a median salary of $65,800. That compares with a median of $39,010 for men in the same age group with only a high school diploma.
• · Middle-skilled occupations such as sales, office and administration positions perhaps most readily open to community college graduates have shown little or no growth over the last decade, and they fell sharply during the recession, according to research by David Autor, an economics professor at MIT.
• · Research shows that inflation-adjusted wages of workers with less than a four-year college degree fell steeply between 1979 and 2007, particularly for men.
• · Many employers regard a four-year degree as a must, even for positions that can be handled by high school graduates.
• · The Bureau of Labor statistics predicts some clear winners in the years ahead. Registered nurses, who generally have an associate's degree, will grow by more than 580,000 over the coming decade. The bureau reports biomedical engineers as the fastest-growing occupation, expanding by 72 percent from 2008 to 2018 (but only 16,000 such workers in 2008).

Bottom line? College degrees still help young (and older) adults get better paying jobs than those without a degree.

Source: http://snipurl.com/z8gnz

In June, the Herman Trend Alert noted that job growth in the technical fields is likely to outpace jobs in the non-technical fields in the near future. This shift, which has been going on for a while now, underscores the value of training and education in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) areas, which an earlier Trend Alert (June 16, 2010) noted as being a good bet for college grads looking for more job possibilities and higher pay.

In addition to the trend emphasizing growth in technology, demographic trends including the aging boomers, and the growing emphasis on healthcare will likely lead to more jobs in health information technology, health law, geriatric healthcare, occupational health and safety, and the pharmaceutical industry. Reflect on this information for just a few minutes, and you can easily come up with a list of at least a dozen related occupations that are likely to be in demand.

Earlier this month, the Trend Alert described additional jobs in other sectors and industries that are likely to be in demand due to the exploding growth of the Web, including the need for graphic designers, videographers, casual game/application developers, and software engineers. Further, changing demographics and workplace needs will emphasize the importance of other occupations. For instance, the increased number of people in the US who speak Spanish will likely increase the need for Spanish/English translators. And the workplace expectation of a more educated and trained workforce will likely increase the number of adults who will need further education to find jobs - which means an increase in the need for teachers and trainers with a background and skills in adult learning.

The urgent need to address environmental issues will continue to translate into growth in jobs that have a "green" component, and those that highlight conservation and protection of the environment (for example, consider all the different types of workers who are needed to aid in the recovery following the recent Gulf oil spill). Workers with training as "marine toxicologists, conservation scientists, marine ecologists, fisheries scientists, and policy makers for the oceans will be hired in record numbers" in the near future, according to The Herman Trend Alert (July 7, 2010).

The collective personality of an organization its organizational culture, yet two errors often happen. Leaders misjudge what the culture demands in reality, and/or managers hire candidates who mirror their own style rather than the organization's. Taking a closer look at the culture of one's company can yield benefits of improved productivity and retention of talent you hire.

One of the surest ways to begin defining your talent philosophy is to ask how employees are treated. Many organizations have evolved philosophies that are easy to understand, such as IBM's philosophy of hiring young people, usually right after college.

Other organizations have philosophies that are much more difficult to decipher either because they have not really defined a common philosophy, or because they have many sub-cultures within the organization. This is particularly true of newer firms who have not yet had the time to evolve a distinct personality.

"Frequently I work with organizations that have developed a talent philosophy that is attractive to candidates but not reflective or what they really do. It is often more a statement of what they want the philosophy to be rather than what it really is," states Kevin Wheeler, the President and Founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc.

Wheeler has developed the following questions to help define a corporation's talent philosophy.

Ten Tough Questions to Answer

1. What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?
2. If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?
3. What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?
4. If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees' personalities, what word would they choose?
5. If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
6. How do you deal with poor-performing employees?
7. Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?
8. How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?
9. What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?

10.  What does an employee have to do/demonstrate in order to be considered for a promotion?

A truly honest understanding of your assumptions about people and their careers, and a solid analysis of what common traits employees should, have will go miles in improving the quality not only of the candidates you bring to the table and but also the people you promote to managerial/supervisory positions.

Takeaway for career professionals: These same concepts and the 10 questions above, can be tools useful to measure a company's cultural fit to a job seeker/candidate.

Source: http://bit.ly/a2IvuM

The largest year-over-year projected increases are in the diversified services industry-with a projected 2011 median salary increase budget is 0.5 to 3 percentage points higher than the actual 2010 budget-and in the diversified financial services industry-with a projected 2011 median salary increase budget is 0.5 or 0.63 percentage point higher than the actual 2010 budget. Among other sectors:

• · The transportation industry is expected to have the lowest median salary increase budget for 2011-2.25 percent for exempt employees and executives.
• · The insurance industry also is below the 3 percent median overall forecast increase for non-exempt salaried, exempt, and executives.
• · The banking sector reported the lowest projected 2011 increase for non-exempt, hourly employees.

Pay for performance continues to be the common approach for the allocation of salary increase budgets as companies remain focused on high-performing employees and growth businesses.

Source: http://bit.ly/cn1V6a