The Professional and Personal Coach Certification program celebrates 10 years
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on Wednesday, November 4, 2015.
Penetrating today’s job market is no easy feat. More than ever, businesses, organizations and individuals are turning to professional and personal coaches to help foster relationships, define trajectories and attain career goals.
And Concordia saw it coming. This September, Concordia became one of only three universities in Canada to offer a training program accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF), a global gold standard in coaching certification.
A decade of experience in the training field
The Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies is proud to mark the 10th anniversary of its Professional and Personal Coach Certification program this fall. Festivities included a get-together on November 3, when the Concordia coaching community re-connected to celebrate the Centre's recognition as an ICF-ACTP Program.
"Career paths in professional coaching are growing at exponential rates," says James Gavin, the Centre’s director. "Why? With relentless demands to change and adapt at work and home, most people are struggling to reinvent themselves over and over. Coaches help individuals see through mind traps and limiting beliefs in creating new success formulas for their lives.”
Indeed, since 1995, the field has grown from approximately 200 certified coaches to more than 60,000 worldwide.
“The ICF rules the world of coaching,” says Gavin, a licensed psychologist and master-certified coach with more than 40 years of experience.
“At the moment, coaching programs exist largely outside of universities, but that is going to change in the next decade.”
As the field rapidly moves off the internet into academia, the advantages of an accredited university-based program become all the more crucial to students, Gavin notes.
“Coaching is now recognized as a bonafide field. Employers will be looking at where their applicants were trained; they’ll look for coaching schools that use evidence-based practice and principles, at the qualifications of the faculty and location of the school itself.”
Concordia’s ICF accreditation gives the program visibility in both the coaching and academic world.
Gavin is one of six master-certified coaches in the country — the highest ICF certification — and has been developing the university’s coaching program over the past decade.
Since its inception in 2006, the program has seen 12 cohorts of graduates; the accreditation will help establish it as the preeminent coaching program in Quebec.
It consists of two modules: the Professional and Personal Coach Certificate, and the new Journey to Mastery: Personal and Professional Coach Certificate Module II.
Students perform 200-plus hours of coursework and supervised practice, as well as participating in individual mentoring sessions. They master several required skill sets, including the ICF’s 11 core coaching competencies, and obtain the necessary hands-on experience to effectively work with future clients.
Find out more about Concordia’s coaching programs at the Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies.