What is your morning routine?

I get up at 6.15am every day, have a coffee, get myself ready and get the children ready with my husband, I drop my youngest son at school and then start work for the day.

I work from home a lot, seeing clients at my home office, or holding coaching sessions remotely via Zoom but I also pop into London for some coaching sessions, or head to a company’s offices if they’ve booked me to support their staff.

How did you get the job / how did you become involved with the industry?

Before becoming a Career Coach my background was in HR and Recruitment.

In my last role I spent a lot of time working on internal recruitment. It meant I was getting to grips with a huge range of different types of job vacancies, writing job advertisements, screening CVs, training managers in interview techniques, holding interviews with them and making offers of employment to successful candidates. Friends and family started asking me for help getting their next roles and I realised I could easily improve their chances with CV tips and interview coaching.

Around the same time, I designed and ran some career development workshops for the company I worked for. I had really positive feedback from my colleagues who attended the workshops and was approached to help some of them personally with developing their careers.

It was so rewarding to support people with their work and seeing them become successful at either getting a new role, changing career or improving in their existing role, that I decided to change career myself. I completed my Career Coach training and set up Bright Sky Career Coaching. I’ve since gone on to also complete Executive Coach training.

What is your main responsibility?

My main responsibility is supporting my clients with their careers. There are three main ways that I offer help:

• Practical support getting their next role.
• Career change coaching.
• Executive coaching.

I work with private clients, who book me to support them personally.

However, I’m also hired by businesses to support their staff. This can range from providing outplacement services (supporting employees with coping with redundancy news and giving them practical support for finding a new job), to providing executive coaching to help a team member overcome a challenge at work.

What is your typical day like?

I keep Mondays and Friday mornings free from coaching to give myself time to catch up with admin and work on my business development.

The rest of my week is usually spent coaching but I also dedicate time to further training. I love learning about new tools and techniques I can use to support my clients. I also block out time each month to create free career resources which I send out via my career tips monthly newsletter.

So, I don’t have a set routine for Tuesdays – Thursdays, it depends on which clients I’m working with and what support they need.

For example, next week I’ve set aside quite a lot of time to design and create some online career workshops that I’ll be running for a retailer that is making redundancies but wants to support their staff with finding their next roles.

What’s the best part of your job?

Seeing my clients succeed. There’s no greater feeling than receiving a message from someone telling me they have got their next job, changed career or overcome their challenges at work. My work is incredibly rewarding

What’s the worst part of your job?

Admin! When I first started working for myself I was trying to do everything. I’ve slowly learnt to let some things go and to delegate them. I have a fantastic Tech Virtual Assistantfrom Workflow VA who looks after my online booking system for me now and they’re helping me to automate some of my other business processes.

What’s your most memorable work moment?

I’m not sure! I’ve had so many memorable moments since becoming a Career Coach. My most recent memorable moment was selling the first copy of my new online CV toolkit and receiving positive feedback from the person who bought it. My children thought I’d lost my mind because I leapt around the room with excitement. The CV toolkit was nearly a year in the making and is the first online course I’ve created, so it was an amazing feeling to know it was finished and helping people to land their next roles.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the same profession?

I get asked for advice about becoming a Career Coach quite a lot, so I have actually written an article on how to become a career coach that shares everything I know about this. My main pieces of advice are to get good training and to build relationships with other coaches. I feel lucky to have become good friends with several other coaches. We all support one another and share ideas.

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