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Report structures

The career coaching session report.

A career coaching report has to survive three weeks. The four sections are wins, insights, commitments and next focus, and the commitments are usually applications, conversations and a version of a story the client has to be able to tell.

Career work runs on a delay. The client does the difficult thing weeks after the session in which they decided to, usually alone, usually the night before. What they have with them at that moment is not the hour of conversation, it is whatever was written down, which is why a career coaching report is the one most likely to be reread and the one most often written as if it will not be.

01The four sections

The four names this kind of work gets, and nothing to fill in.

  1. 01Wins
  2. 02Insights
  3. 03Commitments
  4. 04Next focus

You are not choosing this from a gallery. You answer one question when you sign up and these four become the shape every comes back in. Any of them can be renamed, added to or removed, and your version is what you get from then on.

02A finished report

Not a blank table. The document, written out.

Invented client: Tom, 34, moving from operations into product, session 3 of 6.

Wins
Sent two speculative messages, both to people he had been putting off for a month, and one replied the same day. Rewrote the opening line of his profile without asking anyone's permission first.
Insights
His story has been told as a list of jobs and it should be told as one decision repeated. He noticed that when he described the warehouse project out loud it was the only part where he stopped hedging.
Commitments
Three more messages by Friday, each one naming the specific thing about that person's work that prompted it. Say the warehouse story out loud twice before the call on the 22nd.
Next focus
The salary question, and what he plans to say when it comes before he has an offer.

Every person, session and number above was written for this page. No real client is shown. The four section names are not samples: they are the sections the product fills in today.

03What clients ask for

Three things the reader of this report is actually looking for.

  • The exact wording of the story they told in the session, because it never comes out the same way twice.
  • A short list of what to do before the next session, since the gap is usually a fortnight or more.
  • Something to read half an hour before an interview that is theirs rather than generic advice.

04What goes wrong

Four mistakes, and each one costs a renewal rather than a mark.

  • Summarising the client's story rather than quoting it, which removes the phrase that actually worked.
  • Long lists of applications with no order, so the client starts with the easiest and stops there.
  • Advice with no named deadline, in a field where the client is already avoiding the task.
  • Nothing about what to do when it goes badly, which is the week the client most needs to have read something.

05How it gets written

Five steps, and four of them take no time at all.

  1. 01Record the session

    Record on a phone, a laptop or the call software you already work on, with everybody in the session having agreed out loud first.

  2. 02Upload the recording

    Upload the file when the session ends, or paste a transcript if your call software already made one.

  3. 03Read the draft

    The draft comes back in about a minute, in the four sections: Wins, Insights, Commitments, Next focus.

  4. 04Correct it

    Change anything that is wrong and add anything the recording missed. Nothing goes anywhere until you have done this.

  5. 05Send it

    It goes to the client under your own name and stays on their own page with every report before it.

06Where this came from

Two sources outside this company.

Nearby

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