How to Effectively Work With a Career Coach (And Get Real Results)

Career coaching can be genuinely useful. It can also be a significant investment of time and money that produces very little — not because the coach wasn't good, but because the candidate wasn't using the relationship effectively.

The difference between a coaching engagement that produces real movement and one that doesn't usually comes down to a few specific behaviours: how clearly the person knows what they want, how honestly they engage with feedback, and whether they do anything between sessions. A great coach can't compensate for a passive client, and a mediocre coach can still be useful to a client who comes in prepared and acts on what they hear.

This article covers what the research and practice of career coaching suggests actually drives results — so that whether you're about to start working with a coach or you're midway through an engagement that isn't moving, you know what to change.

Get Specific About What You Actually Need

Career coaching works best with a focused problem. The broader and more vague your starting point, the harder it is for a coach to help you — and the easier it is for sessions to drift toward general conversation without producing anything concrete.

Before you start working with a coach, or at the beginning of a new engagement, it's worth being honest with yourself about what you actually need help with. These are different problems that require different kinds of support:

• Clarity — You're not sure what you want next, or you're weighing genuinely different directions
• Positioning — You know what you want but you're not presenting yourself effectively to get it
• Execution — You know what you want and broadly how to position yourself, but you're not making consistent progress
• Confidence — You have clarity and a reasonable strategy but anxiety or self-doubt is getting in the way

A coach who is excellent at helping someone gain career clarity may not be the best person to help you improve your interview performance, and vice versa. Knowing which category your challenge falls into helps you choose the right coach and frame the work correctly from the start.

Bring the Right Materials to Every Session

One of the most common ways career coaching underperforms is when sessions are spent reconstructing context that should have been shared in advance. A coach who spends twenty minutes every session asking follow-up questions about your background is a coach who isn't coaching — they're still interviewing you.

Come prepared with the materials relevant to where you are in the process:

• Your current resume, and any versions you've tailored to specific roles
• Job descriptions you're actively targeting or considering
• Notes on what's happened since the last session — applications submitted, responses received, conversations you've had
• Any specific questions or decisions you need help thinking through

The session should be the place where analysis, strategy, and feedback happen — not where basic information gets transferred. The more context you provide before the conversation, the more useful the conversation can be.

If you're working on your resume as part of the coaching process, having a well-structured draft to bring to each session makes the feedback faster and more specific. The guidance on tips for writing a strong resume summary is useful groundwork before bringing your resume into a coaching conversation.

Treat Feedback as Information, Not Judgment

The most productive coaching relationships involve a consistent willingness to hear difficult things without becoming defensive. This is harder than it sounds, particularly around materials you've worked hard on or beliefs you hold about your own career narrative.

A coach might tell you that your resume isn't communicating what you think it is. That your story doesn't match the roles you're targeting. That your expectations about timeline or salary are misaligned with the market. That the way you're describing your experience in interviews is underselling the actual work you did.

None of this is a judgment of your worth as a professional. It's information about the gap between how you're presenting yourself and how you're being received — which is exactly what you hired a coach to help you close.

Candidates who treat feedback as a threat tend to defend their existing approach rather than adjust it. Candidates who treat it as data make faster progress.

Do the Work Between Sessions

Coaching sessions create clarity and direction. Progress happens between them.

This is the most common point of failure in career coaching relationships: someone has a productive session, feels motivated and clear, and then doesn't do much until the next one. The momentum from a good conversation dissipates quickly without action, and the next session often starts by re-establishing ground that should have been built on.

Between sessions, the work typically includes:

• Revising your resume or LinkedIn profile based on the last conversation
• Practising interview answers out loud — not reviewing them, practising them
• Submitting applications differently than you were before, if that's what was discussed
• Having networking conversations you've been putting off
• Researching roles, companies, or industries that came up as relevant

Even a small amount of consistent follow-through between sessions compounds. Three applications a week is more productive than a burst of twenty after a month of nothing. One networking conversation a week builds more momentum than a networking push every few months.

For candidates who are also working through job search strategy more broadly, the article on job search strategies that are working now covers the current landscape and what's actually generating results in 2026.

Let Your Goals Evolve as You Learn More

The goal you start coaching with is often not the goal you end up working toward — and that's not a failure of the process. It usually means the coaching is working.

People often begin with a goal that reflects what they think they should want, or what seems most logical from where they're standing at the start. As they do more research, have more conversations, and get clearer feedback on how they're being received by the market, a different picture often emerges. A role that seemed like the obvious next step turns out to require a pivot they hadn't considered. An industry they'd discounted turns out to be a strong fit. Their salary expectations shift in either direction based on what they learn.

A good coach will help you hold your initial goal loosely and update it as new information arrives, rather than treating it as fixed. The trap to avoid is staying committed to an original plan because you've already invested time in it, when the evidence is pointing you somewhere more promising.

Revisit your stated goal explicitly every three or four sessions. Ask yourself whether what you're working toward still makes sense given everything you've learned, or whether it needs updating.

Know When the Coaching Relationship Isn't Working

Not every coaching relationship is the right fit, and recognising that early saves time and money.

Signs that a coaching relationship may not be delivering what you need:

• Sessions consistently feel like general conversation without clear takeaways
• You leave sessions without a clear sense of what to do next
• Feedback never challenges your existing thinking
• The coach's approach doesn't seem to adapt to what you're actually facing
• You feel worse about your prospects after sessions, not clearer

Some of these issues can be resolved by having a direct conversation with your coach about what isn't working. A good coach will welcome that conversation and adjust. If the dynamic doesn't change after you've raised it, it may be worth considering whether a different coach would be a better fit for your specific situation.

The coaching relationship should produce movement. If it isn't after a reasonable period of honest effort on your side, that's useful information too.

If you're also working through the interview process alongside coaching, the article on what to do if an interview went badly covers how to use difficult experiences productively — which connects directly to the kind of iterative learning a good coaching relationship supports.