A whiteboard in a study room at a public library in Al Safa has two columns on it, headed in Siobhan's neat capitals: GROUND and FLYING.
Her client has flown as cabin crew for twelve years, and she's been offered a ground job in the airline's training school. She talks, and Siobhan writes. Under GROUND: "Sleep." "My own bed." "My sister's kids on Fridays." Under FLYING: "The crew." "Not being stuck in one place."
Then the client says, "Maybe I just want a change," and Siobhan writes GROWTH under FLYING and underlines it twice.
Her client stops and reads the board. "I didn't say growth," she says. "I said change. Change could go in either column."
Siobhan laughs, apologises, wipes the word off and writes CHANGE in the gap between the columns. Through the rest of the hour she writes only what she hears, word for word, and she notices how often her marker wants to improve on it.
She has coached careers for two years. Until that afternoon she hadn't noticed that her marker held opinions.
We've invented Siobhan and her client for this guide, but not the word that went up on the board. In our experience, a career coach's own story can reach into a session as quietly as that.
How do you become a career coach?
Train as a coach first and a career specialist second: coach education toward an ICF credential, then real clients who've hired you as their coach, then a niche built from the career moments you handle best. The step that's easiest to skip is quieter. It's finding out what your own career has taught you to want for other people.
What does a career coach actually do?
Several professions help people with their careers, and each has its place. A recruiter fills roles for employers and knows the market. A careers adviser offers information and options. A mentor shares the path they took. A CV writer makes the story on paper clearer.
A career coach works for the client's own agenda and helps them decide. Most of the job sits in the question underneath the one the client arrives with. "Which offer?" turns into "What are you choosing between?" The client leaves with their own answer, not the coach's.
In our experience, a career question in the UAE often arrives with a bigger one folded inside it. A client comes to talk about a title and stays to talk about what the title was meant to prove. So a career conversation can turn, without warning, into something wider, and the coach has to be ready to follow it there.
If you're weighing whether career coaching should be your work, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, will spend twenty to forty minutes with you on a free Zoom, to see whether RSCI and you are a match, and which of our two programmes would fit the practice you have in mind. Pick a time on Sara's calendar. Or read on.
Why do a career coach's own moves end up in the session?
Because the coach has made moves too, and some of them came with a word attached.
Six years ago Siobhan left a permanent post in a hospital HR team in Cork for a job in Dubai. At her leaving drinks her manager raised his glass and said, fondly, "You'll be back within the year." Everyone laughed, Siobhan included. On the flight out she settled on a name for the move: growth. She has been proving it every year since.
Under her marker, then, sits a sentence she'd never say to a client, something like "leaving is how people grow", and her body keeps its own record of that evening: a small lift in the chest when someone chooses to go, and a flat heaviness when someone chooses to stay. When her client said "change", the lift came, and the word that went up on the board was Siobhan's. She'd have called it reflecting back. Her client read it as steering, and said so.
The RS Method answers a reaction like that with removal, at the place it was learned, rather than with a better explanation of it. In our experience, a coach who has done that work can hear "change" and write "change", and the client's word stays the client's.
For a career coach, then, the most useful preparation may be the least career-shaped part of the training, and RSCI puts it first on purpose: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Your own leaving drinks, whatever form they took, get their turn while you train, under supervision, so they aren't still choosing the words when a client's career is on the board.
If any of this sounds like you, it's worth weighing before you choose where to train. A call with Sara costs nothing and is there to answer one question well: whether RSCI, and this moment, are right for you. Ask for a call.
Which credential path suits a career coach?
As we read ICF's requirements, they don't name a specialism, so a career coach follows the same credential route as any other coach. What ICF does define closely is the hour itself: "1 Client Coaching Experience Hour = A full 60-minute session with a client who has hired you specifically as their coach (not in any other capacity)." The same page adds: "Additionally, coaching within a training program, or with students, trainers, or mentors, doesn't count unless it's done outside the classroom, with a real client, and separate from the training credits." (coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026.)
Two things follow for career coaches. Work done in another capacity, such as rewriting a CV or rehearsing interview answers, can be useful, and in our reading it isn't a coaching hour. And the practice rounds you coach inside your own course stay inside the course. Hours for the log come from real clients, outside the classroom, who've hired you as their coach.
For the ACC's own requirements, ICF's ACC page gives the full list, and our guides to ICF ACC requirements and keeping an ICF coaching log go through them in detail.
At RSCI, RS Method Coach includes the ICF Level 1 education pathway toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes the ICF Level 2 education pathway toward the PCC, and can also support an ACC application first.
How do you choose a niche within career coaching?
By the moment of the move, more than the industry. In our experience, clients look for a coach who understands where they're standing, which in career work is usually a transition, not a sector. A few that fit working life in the UAE:
- The first year in a new city. A new role, new colleagues and a network that hasn't formed yet.
- The pivot. Someone good at one profession who suspects they belong in another and can't yet say so at work.
- The first leadership role. Promoted over former peers, and privately unsure they want what came with it.
- The long stay. Years with one employer, and a growing doubt about whether staying is a choice or a habit.
- The step that looks like a step down. The smaller job, the slower pace, the return to a craft they left behind. Siobhan's client, choosing the ground after twelve years in the air, is standing here.
Your positioning can then be a single sentence: who you work with, at which moment, and what they're stuck on. "I coach engineers in their first leadership role who aren't sure they want it" tells a reader at once whether you're for them. Which moments you can hold has a lot to do with which you've lived through and come out of, the subject of choosing a coaching niche. If you're arriving from recruitment or HR, from HR to coach covers what carries over.
Before you choose, check your own vocabulary. It takes half an hour and a pen.
- Write the story of your last career move the way you'd tell it over dinner. Half a page, in your usual words.
- Write it again in the plainest words you can find. What happened, in order, with no adjectives.
- Circle every word in the first version that isn't in the second. Brave, growth, finally, stuck, settled: whatever you find.
- For each circled word, note the choice it praises and the choice it quietly marks down. "Growth" praises going. It marks down staying.
- Picture a client making the marked-down choice. Write the first sentence you'd want to say to them, then the question you'd ask instead.
- Match each circled word to the career moments above where it would tempt you most. Those moments are the ones to coach under supervision first.
- Keep the circled words where you'll see them before a session. They're your words, and that makes them easier to catch on their way to a client's board.
Should a future career coach train with RSCI?
Our own training page answers that best, in three sentences (Life Coach Training page, read on 19 October 2026).
- If you accept that you're the main tool. The page says: "The instrument in every coaching session is you." For a career coach, whose own moves sit in the room unasked, that's where training has to begin, and ours begins there.
- If you want your coaching corrected. Among the people the page says the programmes may not suit is anyone who'd say: "You do not want feedback on your coaching." If you'd rather a supervisor caught your marker improving a client's words than a client did, that line leaves you in.
- If you want the credential route with its limits stated. The page is clear that "After completing the education, candidates must still satisfy ICF's required professional coaching experience and application requirements before ICF awards the ACC credential." RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 with ICF education included, at ICF Level 1. RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 with ICF education included, at ICF Level 2. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Whatever a client's next title turns out to be, our razor describes the coach beside them. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Three years is a long horizon for any career plan. Marko Mladenovic's words come from three years on: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" Those are his three years, and nobody else's can be planned to match them.
Our life coach training page lays out RS Method Coach and RS Method Complete side by side: the online modules, the live training days and the ICF level in each. If career coaching is the work you want, read it this week and choose your route.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If this week's spare evenings have gone on articles like this one, give the next to our life coach training page and see what each programme involves.