The broad purpose of the coaching professional is to work with a wide range of individuals and teams with them to enhance their professional performance. Effective coaching is future-focused, releases potential, and enables transition, transformation and change for business improvement. At its most simple, being coached is spending time talking with someone else about you, your challenges and goals in life. By discussing them with someone who is an “impartial cheerleader for you”, you gain a much greater understanding of yourself, where you want to be and how you can start getting there. The coach acts as a “critical friend” who challenges your ideas and assumptions through questioning and challenging you through questions like “how do you know that is true?”.

Coaching is found in private, public and third sector national and multinational organisations and employers. It is found in every sector across the country including, for example; the health sector, finance sector, engineering and manufacturing sectors, business and professional services, education sector, retail sector, leisure sector, technology sector and construction.

There has been a growing demand for the professionalisation of coaching to include one-to-one coaching, team coaching, leadership coaching and for coaching skills to be embedded within culture and governance infrastructures to support future ways of working.

The broad purpose of the occupation is to work with a wide range of individuals and teams across organisations, to empower and engage with them to enhance their professional performance. Coaching is a way of leading in a non-directive manner, helping people to learn through deep listening and reflective, open questions rather than instructing, giving advice or making suggestions.

Coaching is a way of treating people, a way of thinking and a way of being which is seen as vital to supporting individuals and organisations in increasingly volatile and ever-changing environments. The underlying and ever present purpose of coaching is building the self-belief of others, regardless of the context, to be curious and self-aware, better equipping them to collaborate, innovate, deal with the increasing pace of change and get the best from increasingly diverse environments. Effective coaching is future focussed, releases potential, and enables transition, transformation and change for business improvement. Understanding self, commitment to self-development, managing the contract, building the relationship, enabling insight and learning, outcome and action orientation, use of models and techniques and evaluation are key overarching areas which feature within this occupational area.