What is the Unique Value of a Career Services Professional?

I have been thinking about where the unique value of a career-services professional sits now, when AI can produce so much of what we have traditionally handed to clients. If we define our value by the information we give, the content we create, or the deliverable we produce, we’re competing directly with AI. I don’t think that’s where our greatest value is.

Clients hire us because they want a result, whether that’s the job, the promotion, or the career move. But we don’t control those outcomes. What we can do is lead clients through changes that increase their capacity to get the result they want. Think of it this way: I hire a personal trainer because I want to play tennis again, not because I want to do exercises. The exercises build my capacity; playing tennis is the receipt of that change.

A job offer is the receipt of the transformational work we’ve done with a client. If we want to distinguish our value from what AI offers, we need to understand how we create that transformation and design for it with structure and intention.

And we can use decades of research to inform how we do that.

Create Learning Experiences

Information alone doesn’t build confidence or mastery. Clients don’t feel confident about interviewing because they learned about interviewing; they feel confident once they’ve had successful experiences interviewing. Psychologist Albert Bandura’s research on self- efficacy supports this: people who learn through direct experience develop stronger belief in their own capability than people who only observe or receive information.

There’s a helpful model here from learning science: Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie’s ICAP framework, which sorts learning activities by what the learner is actually doing. High-engagement interactive activities, such as roleplays in which clients respond and adapt to another person, are predicted to produce deeper learning than low-engagement passive activities like reading or listening. When we don’t include high engagement active learning activities in our work with clients, we miss an opportunity to build their capacity. We increase our clients’ learning, and their confidence, when we look for places in our process where the client gets to act, choose, claim, discover, or practice, rather than just receive information.

Cultivate a Strong Bond

Many of us are certified as coaches, but our field doesn’t have an agreed-upon standard for what that means in the relationship we build with clients. Psychologist Edward Bordin’s working alliance model, developed in 1979, offers one, and it has been validated as specifically in career counseling: a 2016 systematic review of 17 studies by Susan Whiston and colleagues found working alliance to be a consistent predictor of client outcomes.

The working alliance model rests on three things: agreement on the goal, agreement on the tasks that get you there, and the bond between practitioner and client. All three need to be present. You can have a great bond and agreed-upon goals, but if there is no agreement on the task – for example, the client isn’t doing the work between sessions – the working alliance is weak. You can also have clear goals and tasks and still fail if there’s no bond, no sense of safety and trust.

That bond is critical to our work because transformation asks clients to take a risk. They may have to admit what they don’t know, try something they might fail at, or reconsider something they’ve believed about themselves for years. Those are vulnerable moments, and our instinct in those moments is often to jump in and fix, solve, or reassure. Research suggests that the better response is to slow down and make room for the client to create
their own insights. Adult-learning theorist Jack Mezirow, whose work is foundational to how we understand transformation, called this moment “critical reflection”; it’s the moment when someone examines assumptions and beliefs they may never have questioned before. Critical reflection is work only the client can do – we cannot do it for them. Our job is to create enough safety and space for it to happen.

Measure the Transformation

When transformation happens, it leaves evidence. Something changes in what a client says, chooses, believes, or does. But in my experience, few coaches make a practice of looking for that evidence. And I strongly believe that we should.

I’ve noticed that many of us default to one of two measures to assess whether our coaching is effective. We look at whether the client got the job, which is an outcome we don’t fully control. Or we look at satisfaction reports, such as testimonials, reviews and ad hoc client feedback, that tell us whether the client liked working with us. Both are good to know. But neither tells us whether something in the client changed. Proving that change
requires a different kind of measurement: asking the same thing before and after, in the same words. That might be a client’s confidence in a specific skill, their belief about their own qualifications, or how often they take a specific action.

The distinction between client satisfaction and client transformation is easy to blur. A client can give you a fabulous testimonial and still not have changed anything about how they think or act. If you want to know whether your work created movement, you have to measure the movement itself, not only the client’s reaction to it.

There is an ethical side to this as well. The PARWCC Code of Ethics is clear that certified coaches don’t promise, guarantee, or even imply outcomes we don’t control when marketing our services. We can’t ethically claim a client will land four interviews in four weeks, or a new job offer in three months. But we can measure, and ethically share, what change they experienced through working with us, and that’s a much stronger and more
honest story than promising results we don’t control.

A Question for Our Own Work

Here is the question I would ask every career services professional: what will be different about this client after working with you? If the answer is only that they will have a document, then we have produced a deliverable, and that is exactly where we compete directly with AI.

If the answer is that they will be able to say, do, or believe something they could not before, then we have designed for transformation. Résumé writers, coaches, interview specialists, and brand strategists come from different corners of career services, but the question applies to all of us. As career professionals, we assess where our clients are, envision where they could be, and apply the judgment and adaptation within a human relationship to get them there. We are all transformation leaders.