Career Management Consultants (Coaches) Help Cheer Workers Toward New Lives
By David Schepp — The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News
On a recent rainy morning, Andrea Giangrande joined three other women at a career workshop, each with the hope of making their work lives more rewarding and less frustrating.
An interior designer by training, Giangrande, 32, of Somers, N.Y., recently began looking for work again after returning to the area from Boston, where she became disillusioned with her career.
Despite the image it may conjure in people’s minds, Giangrande tells the group that furnishing people’s homes and businesses is not glamorous work.
“It’s not ‘Will & Grace,’ ” she says, referring to the TV show that features an interior designer as one of its lead characters.
Moreover, she doesn’t buy into the argument that work is work and that nobody likes their job. “I don’t necessarily agree with that philosophy,” Giangrande says. “You should enjoy it at least a little bit.”
She hopes the half-day workshop by a career-coaching firm, will prod her to a more satisfying career.
Giangrande is typical of the clients counseled by Nicole Aliev and Kathy Kriskey, the seminar’s organizers and veterans of the corporate “rat race,” as they call it, which has chipped away at many workers’ enthusiasm toward their work lives.
Having achieved great success as corporate coaches, Kriskey and Aliev became disenchanted with their own careers. That led them in July to start Rat Race Be Gone, a career coaching and consulting business based in Aliev’s Mamaroneck, N.Y., home.
Career coaching makes sense for everyone, Kriskey says, adding that it needn’t be a long-term commitment. “Sometimes it’s just a few sessions and you totally change your perspective.”
Workers today are feeling less appreciated. Still, that doesn’t mean the workers she coaches necessarily want to leave their jobs. Rather, “it’s about changing how they view their jobs,” Aliev says.
At the core of the women’s philosophy is getting their clients to create an action plan that helps them visualize what their lives will be like a year from now, after they make changes.
Through its seminars, Rat Race Be Gone allows its clients to be vulnerable about their career choices and goals, allowing them to access advice from other members of the group who have an impartial view. By teaming them with other group members at the workshops, participants not only get free advice on how to handle their careers but also a new network of contacts, Aliev says.
In a world where workers are taught to spout bravado about the choices they’ve made in their careers, taking a glaring look at the missteps or the unhappy moments can be quite difficult, both women say.
Career coaching helps frustrated workers look at their situations from a fresh perspective.
“Recognition is a big issue,” Aliev says. “It’s acknowledging that employees go farther if they’re satisfied in their jobs.”
Many workers have stayed in unsatisfying jobs because of fear. “There was so much unknown,” Aliev says, referring to the recent economic recession and national security concerns.
But she and Kriskey have found that with the economy starting to rebound people are saying, “enough is enough.” Workers are no longer willing to stay in boring, miserable jobs any longer in the name of job security.
As for Giangrande, she came away from her four-hour workshop with a positive outlook in the knowledge that she is not alone in her discontent.
“It was therapeutic to be there,” she says.
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