By Ed Adamowicz

Coaching is one of the oldest occupations. Successful athletes have great coaches. Acclaimed actors and actresses have effective drama coaches and marketing (agents). And today, more and more "working people" are turning to professional career coaches to help them achieve goals and ambitions as well.

Career: The word career comes from the Latin word "carrus," meaning cart; car; road; pathway or configured in today's translation to represent a racetrack.

In many respects, one's career is the racetrack for one of life's greatest races -- a race for significance, personal satisfaction, financial reward and creative purpose in pursuit of life's goals and aspirations. However, for far too many people, this has been a painful and unfulfilling race. In essence, a career coach is a race coach helping people survive and thrive in one of the most important races in life -- the race for meaning and purpose.

A look at how the career-coaching profession ha evolved:

* 1907. Though formally introduced in the 1990s, the profession's evolution can be traced back to 1907 when Frank Parsons first developed the idea that we can learn to match people to specific jobs in his work "Choosing a Vocation."

* 1921. John Mills of Western Electric developed the idea that one's vocation/career is "the expression of one's own personality," and is known for breaking down the workings of personality into four categories: ideas, people, things and data/information.

* 1929.


At the start of the Great Depression the concept of group coaching/counseling/support arose where job seekers could gather together and develop job-search strategies and share ideas and "war stories." One of the first groups was known as the Thursday Night Club, founded by Carl Boll, in an effort to assist Harvard Business School graduates. In 1935, the largest group of its kind, Man Marketing Clinic, was formed by Sidney Edlund and served more than half a million people between 1935 and 1955.

* 1933. Carl Boll came up with the message "you are one man in a hundred," plainly meaning that job seekers must be proactive in "selling" themselves to an employer. It was Boll who first acknowledged the job search was a marketing endeavor.

* 1936. Harper and Brothers Publishing published the first true job-hunting book in America entitled, "Your Work Abilities, How to Express and Apply Them Through Man Power Specifications," by A.W. Rahn. Its topics included self-directed job-search techniques, writing a work biography and the use of multiple strategies including contact development.

* 1938. The publication of the oldest job search book still in existence was released, "Pick Your Job -- And Land It!", by Sidney and Mary Edlund.

* 1939. The U.S. Government came out with the Directory of Occupational Titles, with 17,500 job titles/classifications. This gave job seekers a long list of possible jobs to select.

* 1946. The first executive career counseling/management firm as we know them today was formed by Bernard Haldane, Bernard Haldane & Associates.

* 1960s. The market saw an insurgence of 13 job-hunting and career-related books by a small number of authors primarily focused on the topics of résumés, interviewing and salary negotiating.

* 1966. John Holland published his work, "The Psychology of Vocational Choice: A Theory of Personality Types and Model Environments," a landmark book for its time. This was the beginning of studying what personalities were right for specific job types.

* 1969. The creation of a nonprofit employment agency to assist employees and employers find each other was developed by Tom Jackson, hence the process of outplacement services. His first venture Opportunities Unlimited was an organization that specialized in helping terminated employees.

* 1970. The commercial printing of the No. 1 job-search book of all time, "What Color is Your Parachute?", by Dick Bolles, became a success. Bolles, a minister, first developed his work to help jobless members of his congregation. Since 1969, thousands of books have been written on all of the various subject matter of career management including entrepreneurial material. 

* 1990. The first professional association for résumé writers and career coaches was formed by Frank Fox and Jay Block in 1990. Subsequently, the Professional Association of Résumé Writers changed its name to the Professional Association of Résumé Writers and Career Coaches in 2000. Since the mid-1990s, a number of other associations have sprung up to serve the career coaching industry.

* 1995 - present. Certification programs for coaches in various topics by various organizations. PARWCC offers the oldest, most extensive résumé writing (CPRW) and employment interviewing (CEIP) certification accreditations and the most comprehensive career-coaching certification program available in the global arena CPCC, based on Jay Block's System, The Career Coach Leadership Program.
