The Right Fit: Finding Specialized Tech Career Coach

Providing a step-by-step guide to finding a tech career coach, including where to look and what questions to ask.

You have arrived at a juncture. You feel like you are doing everything right but cannot yet achieve what you want. You can also be in the middle of something new and unfamiliar and responsibilities are overwhelming. These are common feelings for people working in the overwhelming and complex world of technology. New technologies get introduced every day, new approaches are discussed at the water cooler weekly. You aspire to be a transformational leader, yet all of the details feel somewhat exhausting and you decide to look for guidance. 

There are a few ways that you can work through this situation. You can continue grinding on your own, you can find a mentor who has done this before or you can seek help from a career coach to navigate the ways that will allow you to persevere in your world. I will discuss below some of the benefits and detriments of these approaches.

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Grinding on your own

While it is an enormous undertaking, it is completely possible to get through the rut all by yourself. It will take time, but with the right approaches and self-study you are bound to make progress. This way will save you money and reduce the number of people that you have to talk to in order to get where you want to go. However, despite the appeal of independence, this is the hardest way to go forward. 

Leadership is both an art and a science that is based on mini-hacks of several human generations that are hard to find in textbooks. And speaking of textbooks, the experience of grinding on your own would be akin to learning physics through carefully crafted experiments and not by consulting proven textbooks. It will take a long time to find all of the useful management knowledge nuggets while also taking a high risk of one-off experimentation in your context - you would not be able to run repetitive runs with different initial conditions. 

If you do decide to try this route, my list of the best business books might be a helpful resource.

Looking for mentors

Alternatively, you can save yourself a lot of time and start meeting with mentors - people with more senior experience than yourself. They could be present at your current workspace, or elsewhere in the industry. Most importantly though, they must possess the experience and information about your particular context to be useful. Their years on the job can be incredibly valuable to you, because they save you from experiencing the same situation yourself and just fast forward to the painless solution part. Some of the more sophisticated mentors would even be able to distill the wisdom in easily consumable pieces of information that are easy to learn and understand. However beware, while most of the mentors are well-intended, they can fall in a few traps while trying to help:

• Focusing too much on their own experience and not enough on your unique situation. They will happily teach you how to catch tuna in the pond, while your goal is to find out how to catch sharks in the ocean.

• They might not ask enough questions to find out more about the details about your situation and offer advice based only on the surface level information. You might be intimidated to clarify them, and their ego might be too large to “descend” to your level of understanding.

• Mentors may struggle to explain things simply and perhaps end up confusing you more.

In any case, mentorships are a great way to support self-discovery and improvements. Make sure that you understand the risks and engage with multiple mentors at the same time so that way you can compare and contrast the approaches.

Selecting a Tech Career Coach

And now let’s discuss the third way of getting guidance for yourself. 

You might have heard of coaching before and you perhaps have a lack of understanding of how it is approached and executed. The interesting part is that you may already have the right feel for the profession, but mostly because professional coaching is a nascent profession and the industry and the world is still working on properly defining the terminology. While exact definitions may vary, the general concept of professional coaching remains the same. It starts with your situation and your opportunities to grow. It is a core belief of coaches that the best way to grow is from where you are at now and the best way to assist you exploring your best path is through asking very powerful questions. Coaches are thought-processing companions and help you get through the difficult parts of being “stuck”. While a mentoring experience will include a process of mapping your mentor’s past and current knowledge to your model of the world, coaching starts where you are at now and grows forward in time. 

You might say then, why is it even relevant that my coach has any technical experience? This, I believe, is necessary to understand what outcomes in the technology industry one might be looking for. There are ways of structuring questions that may come off as guided recommendations for which stones should be turned over for exploration. This is especially helpful for someone who has limited leadership experience and this approach saves permuting across millions of various destinations. It prevents from going on the wrong paths that the industry already with certainty to be wrong ones. While it does put some limited safety guardrails on the process, in the end the experience is very open-ended and similar to other leadership coaching experiences.

Your experience with a tech career coach becomes what you put into it. The more energy and presence you contribute to the process, the more likely the outcomes of the sessions will be aligned with your initial desires.

And that’s it! Hopefully this article about finding the right support for yourself was helpful to you. Let’s chat more and focus on your growth - schedule a complimentary coaching session.