What are your Core Capabilities?
- What are your core capabilities?
- Are they up-to-date with industry and market needs?
- Do they include coaching?
Your core capabilities are the knowledge, skills and abilities that you have acquired over a period of time given your education and experience. They represent the sum total of your learnings to date in your journey to becoming the person you want to be.
However the world of work has changed considerably over the past decade. No longer do employees expect to have a job for life. They expect that they will have a portable career, based on their employability.
What is employability? It’s all the capabilities that you have at the moment – plus more! Basically you add these three elements onto your current strengths and skills – flexibility, adaptability and mobility.
Flexibility is about your willingness to consider other career options outside of your present position or role. People who are flexible explore related positions in which they have expertise and because organisational structures have collapsed in some firms, they consider horizontal movements as well as vertical progressions. These days quality of life and opportunities for growth and development are becoming increasingly important criteria when deciding on that next career move.
Adaptability is about your ability to ‘fit in’ with the job itself and the organisation. Person-job fit includes considerations like: Do I have the right skills? Will I be able to comeup-to-speed in the new role quickly enough? Will I have freedom to make some decisions in relation to my role? Person-organisation fit involves the degree to which your personal values and beliefs coincide with the espoused values and beliefs of the organisation, your assessment of what it’s like to work in the organisation from speaking with others, and the level to which you believe you can commit to making the business goals and objectives meaningful to you.
Mobility is about your ability to relocate to another town, city or country to take up the new position. The impact of moving family away from friends and the local community is one of your first considerations, followed by the thought of having to start afresh to develop networks and support systems. After that, thoughts about where to live, how to commute to work and how long this will take, spring to mind.
In part, your employability in this age of fast and relatively inexpensive travel, comes down to one thing – the level of risk you are prepared to take. How willing are you to put yourself ‘out there’ for your career progression? Do you have what it takes to accept the challenges that lie ahead? Are you willing to give up what you have, for what you might get?
From a coaching perspective, all these thoughts and questions come into play as you work with your client to help them transition to the new job, the new role, the new town, the new city. Emotions may run high at times, and it is your job to reassure your client that heightened emotions and levels of anxiety are ‘normal’ for this major event in their life.
As a coach, your role is to help clients believe in themselves – to remain strong in the face of adversity and persist when all seems lost. You are one of their strongest advocates and supporters in their time of need.
Is becoming a Professional Coach a journey that you are ready and willing to take? Is that you? If so, contact us today to find out how you can add coaching to your already impressive list of core capabilities.
