A professional career coach can play a valuable role in helping others transition, start out a new career, or move upward in their chosen profession.
If that’s your passion, this article is for you. We’ll show you how to design an effective, engaging digital program and the career coaching apps that you can use to maximize your clients’ success rates, plus useful tips and tools to help you up your game!
How To Design Your Career Coaching Program
A career coaching program is essentially a roadmap of the coaching journey that will help your clients achieve their goals effectively.
While you can’t anticipate every twist and turn in that journey, structuring your program in advance is important if you want to help them stay on track and walk away with what they’re paying you for—results.
It also ensures that you don’t forget any vital steps in your process, such as proper onboarding, any learning modules required, checkpoints at key milestones, and a wrap-up evaluation and feedback process.
Before you start developing, curating, and emailing all your career coaching solutions manually, it’s worth looking at the software that can make that entire process much more effective.
As a general rule, you should design your career coaching program starting with the “big picture.” Here’s a useful example of a career development model from Simmons University:[1]
- Assessment (Step One): Helping your client identify their values, skills, interests, and career satisfiers to pin down what a good career fit means to them
- Exploration (Step Two): Your client’s goal at this stage is to explore and research their career possibilities and the opportunities available to them
- Preparation (Step Three): Support your client as they develop their CV and narrow down their goals and strategy, e.g. developing a career action plan
- Implementation (Step Four): Supporting and guiding your coachee as they develop and implement their job search or career strategy, including any skills they need to acquire.
- Decision-Making (Step Five): Finally, your client makes a final decision about their future and takes action on it.
With your program outline mapped out, you can then zoom in to consider the materials required for individual coaching sessions, for instance:
- Coaching forms
- Decision-making frameworks
- Skills development exercises, worksheets, and homework
- Informational handouts and other resources.
At this stage, you’ll need to think about whether a career coaching app will help you put it all together.
Before you start developing, curating, and emailing everything manually, it’s worth looking at the software that can make that entire process much more effective.
3 Best Tools and Apps For Planning Your Sessions
Career coaching software is not new. If you haven’t used it before in your work, though, there are a range of solutions that can help you build resources such as worksheets or lessons and share them with your clients.
Some will even help you organize them into programs and collect your clients’ responses, while others will simply help you organize your calendar by letting your coaches schedule appointments.
Depending on what tools you’re after, the following virtual coaching platforms may be a good place to start your search:
| App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Quenza is a user-friendly, but simultaneously very powerful virtual coach platform with tools for every step of your coaching journey. Its drag-and-drop Activity Builders make it quick and simple to create bespoke activities from scratch, by inserting checkboxes, sliding scales, text boxes, video, audio, and more into your own exercises, homework, lessons, and even intake forms. Once built, these Activities can be assembled into Pathways and scheduled for automatic sharing with your clients. Its features include:
|
| Name | Quenza |
| Price | $1+ monthly |
| Good For | Coaching Management Software, Client Engagement, Life Coaching, Coaching CRM, Executive Coaching, Mental Health Coaching |
| More info | Quenza |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | My Coach Office is a useful coach app for appointment scheduling, invoicing, bulk emailing, and other coaching management functions – it can be used by solo remote coaches or teams. It comes with some modifiable lesson templates to help you get started with your programs, as well as some features to help you with growing your online business. Examples include MCO’s tools for:
|
| Name | My Coach Office |
| Price | $24+ monthly |
| Good For | Business Coaching, Coaching Management, Client Engagement, Virtual Life Coaching |
| More info | My Coach Office |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Cloud, SaaS, and web-based calendar management software Acuity Scheduling can be handy for virtual coaches who want to streamline their calendar management, accept client bookings online, and take digital payments with an all-in-one coaching management solution. While it does not support program or activity design for virtual career coaches, it can be a fast and efficient way to centralize your appointment scheduling and send session reminders. Features include:
|
| Name | Acuity Scheduling |
| Price | $15+ monthly |
| Good For | Coaching Management, Client Engagement |
| More info | Acuity Scheduling |
What To Look For In a Coaching App
As you can see, today’s digital marketplace is full of specially designed career coach tools that are purpose-built to eliminate the admin legwork that isn’t necessarily a career coach’s forte.
To help you narrow down the top options above, here are some crucial features to look for in specialized career coach software:
- Course or activity design tools – to help you create assessments, worksheets, or client templates for CVs and cover letters
- Client engagement tools – such as live chat for staying in touch between sessions, or email notifications
- Custom form builders – for sending out feedback questionnaires, onboarding forms, or session rating scales
- Coaching session planner tools – handy for creating unique packages in advance, then sharing them on autopilot with clients, and
- Practice management tools – such as appointment calendars, invoicing features, and payment processing functions.
Ideally, you’ll be able to use a white-label career coach app, allowing you to customize all your client correspondence and materials with your own corporate logo.
A professional touch, after all, goes a long way in strengthening your coaching brand.
Only a few of the career coaching apps above will help you with the most important career coaching tasks, so make sure you choose a solution that will increase your impact the most.
2 Top Career Coaching Platforms and Software Systems
An all-in-one solution such as Quenza, above, is generally a great choice if you want to streamline the majority of your coaching tasks.
If you’re looking for some extra help, however, here are two more apps that you can use for appointment scheduling and similar admin.
Click here for our full review of the best coaching management software solutions in 2023.
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | 10 to 8 is an easy-to-use platform for virtual coaches who want to streamline their calendar management and appointment scheduling. It offers a basic Client Portal/Online Booking feature that can accept client payments when used with Stripe, Stripe Commission, PayPal, and SagePay. For a small fee, 10 to 8 coaches can brand their correspondence with their corporate logos. Other features include:
|
| Name | 10 to 8 |
| Price | Free+ monthly |
| Good For | Coaching Management, Client Engagement |
| More info | 10 to 8 |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | vcita is a business management solution that specializes in CRM and appointment scheduling. The platform offers an Android and iPhone app for clients, plus various integrations with accounting, marketing, and payment processing software. Other features include:
|
| Name | vcita |
| Price | $19+ monthly |
| Good For | Career Coaching, Coaching Management, Client Relationship Management, Appointment Scheduling |
| More info | vcita |
How To Improve Your Impact As a Career Coach
There’s no one ideal career coach for every potential client, but with the right coaching skills, many coaches offer a valuable service that can greatly empower those they help.
That said, knowing how to coach others is not the same as running a successful career coaching business online—so if you’re coaching others virtually for the first time, here are a few handy tips:
- Cater to your target market: Understanding your target clients will help you deliver results, but only if you adapt your approach to suit their needs. With a career coaching app such as Quenza, you can personalize everything from the exercises you share to your automatic email text, enabling you to directly cater to their interests and maximize their results.
- Automate your client engagement: The more bought in your clients are, the more likely they are to do the work and achieve great results. Because keeping clients engaged over the long term can take up a lot of time, it’s a very good idea to invest in a career coaching platform that will send nudges, reminders, and follow-ups on your behalf.
- Build your coach branding: A strong brand will help you gain more clients, obviously! This is where white-label software such as Quenza can be greatly valuable, by allowing you to use your own logo, email address, and more.
- Seek feedback: Learning about your clients’ likes and dislikes with regard to your services gives you valuable insights on how to improve. Use surveys, questionnaires, or feedback forms to invite them to share their views, such as Quenza’s customizable Session Feedback Form template/Expansion.
- Plan ahead: The more your reputation grows, the more potential you will have to increase your impact with workshops, classes, and group coaching. Make sure you plan ahead by choosing software with features to support your future ambitions, such as Quenza Groups or Organizations.
Final Thoughts
As a first-time or even a highly seasoned career coach, increasing your impact with digital tools can seem intimidating. Fortunately, you’re not the first practitioner to adapt their services to a changing marketplace – so there is a wealth of ready-made, specially designed career coach tools all ready for you to get familiar with.
If you’ve found inspiration in any of these career coaching templates, exercises, or activities, you’ll find it more than easy to start crafting your own. Do let us know how you went with a comment.
We hope you enjoyed this review. Why not start designing your own online career coaching solutions with your 30-day, $1 Quenza trial?
I am interested to know more about your Career Coaching Solution.
Hi and thanks for your comment!
We have an article on career coaching tools here: https://quenza.com/blog/career-coaching-program-tools/ with information on how to design and deliver your programs.
Quenza’s latest Expansion update also includes a large number of new career coaching tools and forms to make your work much easier, such as a customizable Career Coaching Intake Form, Ikigai Expansions, and more.
We’ll be updating this article soon!