As you consider ways to attract and retain your association’s members, it’s important to keep in mind what your members really want from their membership. Association trends research from Community Brands shows that help with career advancement is consistently among the most important benefits to members – especially those early on in their career.
A great way to give your members the career development help they want is to offer career coaching.
What does career coaching do?
Career coaching can help your members develop critical job-hunting skills, determine a career path, and find opportunities for professional growth. A Harvard Business Review article offers up several scenarios in which a career coach can help, including when you:
- Don’t know what you want to do next with your career
- Aren’t sure how to make your résumé both substantive and simple
- Miss your last job
- Have been interviewing, but haven’t landed your next job
- Aren’t moving up in your career
How can your association provide members with career coaching?
YM Careers by Community Brands makes it easy for associations to provide members with career coaching. YM Careers offers job board software to power your online job board, and a Career Planning Portal is included with every YM Careers job board. It’s a career growth hub that provides professionals in your industry with a comprehensive set of career resources, including Career Coaching.
Career Planning Portal by YM Careers
With Career Coaching, members are matched with a career expert who will guide the members in career planning, résumé building, negotiation, and interviewing. Career Coaching presents a directory of experienced professional coaches that can be filtered by practice or industry so that members can find the right match for their needs.
The coaches can help members to do things like:
- Work through career challenges
- Establish career goals
- Add direction to career goals
- Prepare for job interviews
How can Career Coaching help members throughout their career?
Career Coaching can help your members through every career stage – whether a member is just starting out or is in the later career stages. Here are some examples of how Career Coaching can help your members in each career stage:
- Students and new graduates have a professional resource to help them develop necessary skills to land a job, such as interviewing, networking, résumé writing, and personal branding.
- Career changers get real-world advice and mentorship to help them through the process of switching jobs.
- Remote workers gain professional help in working through a career plan so they can succeed in a work-from-home environment.
- Unemployed professionals can work with an experience coach to practice interviews, navigate challenging discussions about unemployment, and gain encouragement if they aren’t getting traction in job searches.
- Professionals returning to the workplace can brush up on interview skills and gain help with résumé writing, discussing résumé gaps, and more, so that they can rejoin the workforce.
- Late-stage careerists can become reinvigorated as a professional coach shares experiences, helps to develop a plan of action, and helps to practice skills or conversations to encourage career advancement.
As your members turn to your association to help them with career growth, giving them tools and resources, such as Career Coaching, will help them make more informed career choices and optimize every career stage. They’ll have a better member experience and are ultimately more likely to become loyal members.
