↗️ On the State of Online Coaching

This week is different.

I recommend an article by Josh Bersin on the exciting state of the coaching industry:

“The Flourishing, Surprising, Badly Needed Market For Online Coaching”

Josh is a brilliant contributor to the HR field. He has wide-market view of HR, learning and talent management. He is zoomed-out AND zoomed-in at the same time. And he looks at this practice with a focus on technology, which I enjoy a lot.

“An exploding, changing market.” This is how the article describes online coaching. Josh rarely writes specifically about coaching, but when he does, it is worth your time!

His main messages:

• Coaching is a vibrant industry with year-on-year growth of 12-15%.
• Some segments grow by over 100% per year (take note!).
• The average coach makes about $47,000 a year (data from 2019).
• There are way more than 70,000 coaches in the world and it’s nowhere near enough to satisfy growing demand for this intervention.
• An exploding number of coaching technology companies are aggregating, coordinating and improving access to coaching.

My take: it’s an industry that matures and standardises. Which is great and badly needed. Let’s remember: ‘coaching’ is not a protected profession and anyone can call themselves a coach.

Hence, two things are so important in my view:

• A body like the ICF (International Coaching Federation) sets high standards for coaching quality and enforces them with rigour (FYI, our coach training course at Intellicoach is ICF-accredited!).
• Big players like BetterUP, Torch, CoachHub etc make professional coaching accessible to a much wider audience.

As a result, for companies, it becomes easier and easier to purchase great coaching as a scaled service. This will be a boon to democratising it, something which I am personally very passionate about.

What does this mean for new coaches entering the field?

My brutally honest observations and expectations:

1. Good coaching skill is only a small part of running a coaching business.

2. Most new coaches are quite bad at marketing themselves and underestimate the need to go out there, pick a niche and sell.

3. I observe that many coaches now work with one of the top players, like BetterUp etc. On the positive side, this gives experience, exposure, clients and a modest income. On the downside, people who leave the corporate world to become a coach then enter into another kind of dependency relationship. It can be a reality shock.

4. It will take the average coach at least 1-3 years to build themselves a name and client base.

5. I can count on one hand the number of coaches I know who live from coaching alone (and I did not even need all my fingers).

6. Lastly, I truly believe that this democratisation will increase the overall cake sizeably. There will be a larger ‘commodity’-like market for bulk coaching contracts through the big coaching players. And this grown awareness will at the same time increase the demand for bespoke, higher-priced coaching services.

All in all, it is a mixed and exciting bag and a vibrant industry to watch out for!