The Flashlight Model: Practical Coaching Skills for Career Development Conversations
Overview
As a career development practitioner, you already guide clients through real, often high-stakes transitions. This course helps you deepen that work by integrating a coaching approach into your existing practice, so your conversations create more than just next steps. You'll build the awareness, knowledge, and skills to create productive learning environments and navigate conversations that strengthen the practitioner-client relationship, expand your client's perspective, and build the hopefulness and momentum that turn insight into action.
Career Development in Practice introduces the 5 core components of the Flashlight Model: Foundation Building, Opening, Exploring, Closing, and Implementing. Through cohort-based learning and practice with fellow practitioners, you'll sharpen your coaching skills and build confidence for yourself and the clients you serve.
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:
- Navigate and lead career conversations from beginning to end using the Flashlight Career Development Coaching Model
- Understand the different approaches used in career development conversations (coaching, counselling, advising, mentoring, teaching)
- Employ the different elements of the Flashlight Model to support client agency, hope, and forward momentum
- Reflect on who you are as a career development practitioner, identifying areas of strength and development in relation to coaching skills and presence
- Develop a network of career development practitioners
- Understand how a coaching approach to career development conversations connects with the Hope-Action Theory, Active Engagement, Creativity, and Career Wayfinding
Is this course for me?
This course is designed for career development professionals who have career conversations with clients, students, or direct reports and want to learn how to increase their impact and develop practical skills and depth in their practice.
This course is for people who:
- Are career practitioners, educators, and professionals supporting clients, students, or direct reports in their career development
- Want to increase their impact by developing coaching skills that build connection and foster agency
- Are curious about what it means to take a coaching approach, grounded in the International Coaching Federation's definition of coaching
- Enjoy learning in a community-based, cohort setting