Selecting a Business Coaching Course

Passionate amateurs, empowered by technology driven training, first joined together and formed 'Pro-Ams' coaching associations/groups. Today, these groups are driven bottom-up by the great number of amateurs certified as "coaches". Pro-Ams typically challenge the trend for the professionalization of coaching by trying to blur the distinctions between amateurs and professionals and 'bottom-downing' Membership training standards/Standards of professional practice and any ongoing Professional development of members. Some professionals find this pattern so unsettling that they seek to infiltrate and try to change the coaching associations’/groups’ culture and standards. Unfortunately, through weight of numbers their voice are lost. Most professional coaches today simply do not require membership of any so-called, mislabelled "professional association" and actually seek to distance themselves from that end of the marketplace

The ICF Question
To date, there is no association that has been accredited by any government body and certainly none that is truly representative of full-time, professional, practicing coaches in the workplace. The reality is that some of the larger "international" coaching associations were privately founded by commercial training companies for the purpose of externally ‘legitimizing’ their training courses. These types of associations typically have a private business agenda that concentrates on adding large numbers of members to their database for commercial purposes.

Coaching Accreditation and Certification
Some important issues concerning the ICF:
1. "There are many reputable and worthwhile coach training organizations that neither provide credentials nor orient their curriculum to the ICF...At the present time several coaching associations are competing to gain additional members...Consequently, coaching associations open their membership to anyone who is willing to pay the membership fee. While this inclusiveness helps these associations gain the revenue they need to operate, and all the associations typically require that members agree to a code of ethics or code of conduct, only one of these associations appears to provide any system to review or, if necessary, discipline the ethical practices of its members.

Accrediting coaching schools must be conducted at an arms-length, independent distance in order to ensure credibility of these decisions.. The recent decision of the International Coach Federation to only include ICF accredited schools (or those schools that have paid the ICF to consider them for accreditation) on their list of approved coach training organizations did little to reduce cynicism about the ICF's purpose, and, in fact, increased their conflict of interest." -'A Guide to Coach Credentials' Paper (2004) by Dr R Carr

3."Our research has identified two important internal weaknesses: a) Individuals with no intention of becoming properly trained are joining the ICF (currently 8366 members) and calling themselves ICF coaches, thus adversely affecting the integrity of both our profession and our professional association. b) Many ICF coaches are themselves confused about the educational and credentialing standards." Steve Mitten, ICF President, Coaching World Newsletter, January 2005

4."Coaches do not have to be credentialed to join ICF." -Change in ICF Member Categories Effective April 1, 2006, Coaching World Newsletter

5. What ICF coaches earn: Almost 4 in 10 earn less than $10k. Over 50% said it took them up to 2 years of marketing to get their first paid coaching client. Fifty percent said that they are only working with one to six clients per month. -ICF published membership survey.

A business coaching course must provide validated behavioral-based coaching change models, tools and techniques:
Many so-called "certified coaches" churned out by the "coaching associations" are simply doing more harm than good. Meantime, many large, high-profile coach training schools are still teaching simplistic models of coaching that employ re-labelled, old performance counselling strategies or, in some cases, scientifically unproven fuzzy techniques. While such "coaches" may initially get their foot in the door of a needy client, their ineptness, poor training and poor grasp of leading-edge coaching technology is quickly found out.

Any professional business coaching course must be 'evidence-based’:
'Evidence based' is a scientific approach whereby professional practice is capable of being justified in terms of sound evidence based upon a process of methodical clinical and industry research, evaluation, and the utilisation of up-to-date systematic research findings to support decisions about practice. Evidence-based coaching is a way of distinguishing professional practice grounded in proven science versus the simplistic, unproven coaching approach popularized by the many coaching associations and coach training providers engaged in mass-marketing to a primarily uneducated marketplace.

Evidence based coaching with industry best practice invalidates previously accepted approaches and replaces them with new ones that are more powerful, more accurate, more efficacious, and safer. Evidence based coaching also allows the practitioner to provide his/her client more effective and accurate assessment, more informed program planning and selection of the appropriate coaching technology. For example; in the world's top-rated business coaching course (ICAA Survey 2006) -only evidence-based, validated, behavioral scientific models, accelerated behavioral change tools and techniques etc are used in the Behavioral Coaching Institute's advanced, 4-Day Certified Master Coach course (conducted in New York, London, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore etc).

Some Snapshots of the Institute's Certified Master Coach Workshop:


	Discussion		Case Study Analysis		Role-Playing		Break-Time