You might be here because you know your current career isn’t the right match for you, you feel like resigning tomorrow, or you’ve been made redundant. If any of those is where you are right now, career change coaching takes you from confusion to clarity about what’s next.

I also work with people who are in the right role for them but who want to develop their career, for example, by helping them to gain a promotion, to handle an overwhelming workload, or a difficult relationship, or to prepare them for an interview.

Gave me back my positive attitude

I can fully recommend Michelle. She brought clarity to my career decisions when I really had no idea where I was going or what to do and gave me back my positive attitude which had been long buried. I use her techniques now whenever I face a decision.

Vanessa, artist and teacherSouth London

I’ve answered some of the questions you might have about career coaching here but for a free no-obligation career coaching consultation, please contact me.

Career coach Michelle Bayley on career change

Working mainly with professional people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, I’ve specialised in career change and career development coaching for over 18 years. I spent a long time feeling stuck about my own career choice, so it feels really purposeful for me to help other people to get unstuck and to enjoy their work.

Depending on the changes you want to make, as your career coach, my job includes:

  • Helping you to understand what you really want from your work (not what you think you should want)
  • Helping you to generate meaningful new career possibilities to explore, so that you can choose the best match for you
  • Giving you tools to deal with your inner critic which might be telling you there’s no way you can change career
  • Helping you to set boundaries and ask for what you want from your manager or colleagues.
  • Keeping you focused on why you’re making changes when it feels tough going (and celebrating with you when you get there!)

How does career change coaching work?

To help you find work that you’ll love, I use Firework™ the UK’s leading career change process. Its three phases –  Explore, Dream and Discover – bring you clarity about what you want from your work, enable you to generate meaningful new career possibilites and a plan to take you from where you are now to where you want to be.

In the Explore phase, you answer interesting, thought provoking exercises outside your coaching sessions and we then dig deep into them to uncover the most important information about you. At the end of Explore, you have a blueprint of yourself, including:

  • Your values
  • Your strengths and skills and which you most enjoy useing
  • What motivates you about work (apart from having bills to pay)
  • What a great working enviroment looks like for you and how you like to work
  • Your achievements
  • What most interests you

In the second Dream phase, you generate exciting new career possibilities, so that, outside of your coaching sessions, you can find out more about the ones that most appeal to you.

With your evidence about what you want from your work (captured in your blueprint) and your evidence about the possibilites that most appeal to you, you can then make a well informed choice about the career that’s the best match for you.

In the final Discover phase, you create a plan to take you from where you are now to where you want to be – doing work that feels fulfilling and enjoyable.

Who are your clients?

Anyone who knows that they want their working life to be better, whatever field they’re in. I have a wide range of clients with backgrounds in communications, IT, law, teaching, finance, project management, property, higher education and digital media. I’ve mainly worked with:

  • people in their 30s and 40s who know their current role isn’t the right match for them
  • people who’ve been made redundant/taken voluntary redundancy who don’t want to go back to the same type of role
  • women who’ve returned to work after maternity leave and their job doesn’t fit with their life anymore
  • people in their 50s who want the last phase of their career to be more fulfilling.

I also career coach managers and leaders who want to gain promotion or who want to make positive changes to any aspect of their work.

Contact me for a free no-obligation consultation to find out more about career coaching .

What’s the difference between career coaching and career counselling?

Career coaches and career counsellors have a broad range of approaches and some may be similar but roughly speaking, a career coach helps you to uncover what you want to do for yourself and a career counsellor will be more likely to make recommendations about what you should do next.

What if I want to change my career and other areas of my life too?

The Firework™ programme is flexible so it’s absolutely fine to combine it with coaching about other parts of your life.

New possibilities I had never previously imagined

During the five months I spent working with Michelle I can definitely say I grew in confidence and managed to reignite a career I thought I had wanted to abandon. I also became very clear on priorities at work and at home as well as seeing new possibilities I had never previously imagined. I highly recommend coaching with Michelle.

Glen, development consultantBrighton

How long does the career change programme take and how often are the sessions?

The duration of the programme flexes, depending on:

  • Whether or not you want to create new career possibilities or to test out ones you already have in mind
  • How quickly you want to progress
  • How busy you are in other areas of your life.

We would discuss what could work best for you in the initial free consultation, but as a guide:

  • If you want to create totally new career possibilities, the full programme is around 12 hours of coaching time.
  • If you already have some strong career possibilities in mind and want to choose between them, it takes roughly six sessions to complete the blueprint of what you want from your work, so you can then assess the best match for you. If this isn’t immediately clear, you can have further sessions to help you decide.

In both scenarios, sessions are generally an hour and to maintain momentum you should have a minimum of two per month. If you want to move through the process more quickly (eg if you aren’t currently working), you can have longer, more frequent sessions.

As a professional certified coach (PCC)  with the International Coach Federation (ICF), I follow their code of ethics and wouldn’t coach you for more sessions than you need.

When and where do sessions take place?

I coach in regular working hours, Monday to Friday and in the evening Monday to Wednesday. We agree a convenient time, preferably at the same time and day of the week.

I work with many of my clients online and also see clients face to face in my office in Twickenham, South West London.

Twickenham is convenient for Richmond, Teddington, Brentford and Hampton. And it’s on the trainline for Clapham, Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes, Kingston and Wimbledon.

How much does career coaching cost?

My fees vary according to what you want to get from your career coaching.  Contact me to find out more.

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