Looking for an amazing coaching certification programme? This is what to consider when choosing the best one for you.
Summary: Coaching courses vary in length, price, syllabus, and much more, so here’s your guide to choosing the right fit for you!
Author:
Ridhima Dosani
Read Time: 5 mins
Table of Contents
Looking for an amazing coaching certification programme? This is what to consider when choosing the best one for you.
Finding yourself wondering what is the best executive coaching qualification? There is a wide variety of courses available for leadership coaching, business coaching and executive coaching, so when you are trying to decide which course to enrol in there are a few things to consider to ensure you make the best decision for you.
Coaching courses vary in length, price, syllabus, and much more, so with a busy schedule you need to weigh up your options. There is also the matter of finding a course that is great value for money and ensures results, so you can make sure to kick start your coaching career with the right one.
Why do people become coaches?
Coaching is a very varied and exciting career that can be flexible around other commitments and provide people with the opportunity for a fresh start. It is perfect for those looking to start their own business or move into freelance work. It is also very fulfilling in the fact that your job is to help and support people on a day to day basis.
As well as a career option, coaching certifications are also pursued for supporting personal development, as well as professional development in careers outside of coaching. Becoming an accredited coach can help with your personal development through building confidence, communication skills, and much more. In terms of professional development, coaching certifications can be beneficial for anyone in a leadership role; from sports teachers and instructors to business advisors and social influencers.
2. What is the importance of an accreditation?
It is important to choose a coaching course that has been accredited by a respectable organisation that knows what to look for in coaching certifications.
In the UK, there are a few organisations that offer accreditations to coaching courses, such at the International Coaching Federation. The ICF is internationally recognised as the gold standard for professionally trained coaches around the world.
At The Executive Coaching Bootcamp, we are accredited by the ICF. This means that we are part of a group of elite coaches that are held to the highest standards, ensuring that we are committed to delivering excellence in coaching. An ICF accreditation promises a comprehensive coaching education and provides measurable results for our clients.
Different accreditations hold their coaches to different standards, so it is important to find which is the best fit for you.
3. Results for Clients
Any good coaching programme will focus its teaching and practises on getting results for its clients. At The Executive Coaching Bootcamp, our syllabus is highly client focused. We will train you in everything from coaching conversations for results and client satisfaction, to coaching from a client-focused perspective. By having our clients as a primary focus, we can ensure great results and return on investment for you as a newly qualified coach. Success with one client can even cover the entirety of your tuition fee.
Our entire philosophy is based around focussing on value, measurable results, and impact from the client’s point of view; by delivering value for your clients and you will succeed.
4. Flexibility
With many people joining the world of coaching having a busy schedule, flexibility is very important in terms of being able to complete the course to a high standard. Our executive coaching courses only require you to take three days off from your usual activities, as the bootcamp is intensive and is designed to leave you feeling confident and ready to start professionally coaching clients straight away. But the other aspects of the programme are extremely flexible and only require the odd hour here or there, so there is no need to take any other full days or even half days off. 50% of the 125 learning hours must be gathered from live teaching and 50% can be gathered offline.
You can see an outline of the learning hours below.
62.5 hours of live learning:
3 Day Intensive bootcamp (26hrs) – designed to leave you feeling ready and confident to take on new clients
2 X 90 min follow up sessions (3hrs) - scheduled based on your availability and that of the rest of your cohort
ICF Mentor Coaching (12hrs) – only 12 hrs over 3 months (about 1hr a week)
Live web classes (21.5 hrs) – we run 12 X 1hr web classes each week at different times and on different days to allow our international student base to join the ones that suit their availability. Each class covers a separate topic so you can just join the ones that interest you and suit your availability
If you are not joining our bootcamp options, those hours will be substituted with live web classes only
62.5 hours of offline learning:
Self Study (25 hrs) - of course this is fully flexible and you do it whenever suits you/your availability
Archived web classes (37.5 hrs) – All of our 12X 1hr web classes get recorded and added to our large archive, so you can listen to any you missed offline and gain your offline learning hours that way at a time that suits you.
Coach Experience Hours
The ICF requires you to have 100 coach experience hours for the ACC and 500 coach experience hours for the PCC. Crucially, the ICF only accepts coach experience hours that have been earned after you have signed up for an ICF approved programme.
Coach Matching Service - If you are already actively coaching clients, you can earn hours from doing so. If you are like many of our other students who are not yet actively coaching your own clients, we help you earn your coach experience hours via our coach matching service. At no extra cost, we will match you with other students on our programme who are also looking to build their coaching experience hours and you arrange times/days when you are available to coach one another. You coach them and they coach you on a weekly/fortnightly basis for as many hours as you can both accommodate. You can be matched with as many students as your availability will allow, so you can collect these hours as quickly as possible. This is known as ‘barter coaching’ and counts towards your ICF required coach experience hours. Students are also able to blend hours from their own clients and hours from barter coaching to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. This is included in the programme and there are no additional costs for this at all.
We recognise that these coaching programmes are an investment and not something that everyone can afford up front. For this reason we offer payment plans for our courses to make sure that these coaching courses are accessible to those who wish to pursue a career in coaching.
5. Quality & experience of instructors
When investing in a coaching programme, it is key to determine whether the instructors have the knowledge and experience to provide you with the skills and quality teaching you need to excel in your coaching career.
Our founder, Ridhima, has a wealth of experience in the field of executive coaching. She is an experienced executive and leadership coach, team coach and ICF certified coach trainer. Ridhima has worked as a coach in large organisations such as BP, SWIFT, IBM and 3M. Her coaching clients include entrepreneurs, ambitious trail-blazers, social influencers, executives and leaders looking to increase their influence.
Thanks to Ridhima, The Executive Coaching Bootcamp recently became the Western European provider of the Centre for Executive Coaching’s ICF Certified Executive Coach Training Programme. Having trained new coaches for years, Ridhima knew she wanted to provide a programme that came with the tools and resources to set new coaches up for real success in the market. She is highly experienced in providing coaching training that not only covers the academic side of coaching, but also involves lots of practical experience to ensure her students leave knowing exactly how to start working with clients.
6. Syllabus & what is covered
Being able to go over the contents of a coaching course is very important in understanding what to expect and recognising whether a particular course meets your needs and expectations as a trainee. It should also help you tell whether this is the right fit for you in terms of your goals.
Within our executive and leadership coaching courses we value practical experience more than theory. We provide you with the knowledge and theory that you need to know, but we ensure you spend even more time practising the crucial techniques so that you leave our programme with practical coaching experience instead of just the theory. This is essential when you are qualified and begin working with clients as it guarantees the best results.
We prepare you for anything that you might have to coach someone on in a professional setting; as many eventualities as possible are covered in our programme so you will know how to deal with anything that your client brings to your sessions. Specifically, we cover lots of case studies, practice coaching clients on all of the common issues that clients bring to you as their coach.
Some examples of what we cover in your training sessions include:
Behavioural coaching
Perceptual coaching
Situational coaching
Career coaching/preparing your client for a promotion
Giving your own client feedback
Accountability coaching
Facilitation skills
Team coaching and how to create and make money from team coaching workshops
How to coach clients reporting overwhelm/burnout
How to coach clients struggling to motivate their people/teams
How to coach clients to build leadership presence/leadership tune-up
How to coach clients to develop their leadership vision
Preparing clients for high stakes conversations
How to conduct motivating feedback conversations
How to coach high potentials
How to coach clients to maximise their influence and use it strategically
How to coach a client to strategically grow their network to reach key goals
How to motivate clients towards action
How to coach a leadership teams
How to coach an organisation to embrace organisational change or a new organisational culture
How to use assessments in your coaching engagement
How to plan, setup and customise a coaching engagement for a new client
How to return your ROI to the client so your value is not questioned
How to blend coaching with consultancy and training
How to find your niche in the market and position yourself to stand out from the crowd
How to strategically add value throughout the engagement to ensure your client extends/renews the engagement
We also make sure you have the time and support to plan ahead during your training, for when you have completed the course. We want to make sure you succeed after your coaching education and will provide ongoing support after you have completed the course. Whether you want to gain employment as an executive coach or leadership coach, or set up your own business, then we are here to help.
7. What do past students have to say?
Looking into reviews and testimonials from a coaching training provider is key in getting an insight into the experience and successes of coaches trained within this particular organisation.
At The Executive Coaching Bootcamp we get brilliant results for our trainee coaches, and we love to watch them succeed and progress in their coaching careers.
“I’ve been training with Ridhima for the last 6 months and I’ve always left each session feeling more capable than the last.
I’d never coached anyone before and now I’m successfully coaching two teams and two senior members of staff and I’m enjoying every moment of it.
She really cares and her deep knowledge of interpersonal relationships was key to my success. I could never thank her enough.’’”
Godefroy Vandepoele, Belgium, SWIFT, Professional Coach:
‘‘I've been training with Ridhima for the last 6 months and I've always left each session feeling more capable than the last.
I'd never coached anyone before and now I'm successfully coaching two teams and two senior members of staff and I'm enjoying every moment of it.
She really cares and her deep knowledge of interpersonal relationships was key to my success. I could never thank her enough.''
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