The Evolving Marketplace for Development Coaching

Abstract

The coaching market today is evolving very rapidly and shows the following symptoms of an expanding market:

• rapidly proliferating competition (due to the obvious and expanding opportunity and low barriers to entry)

• multiplying definitions and expectations of coaching which are shaping the market (for example requiring the profession to be more rigorous about demonstrating added value)

• increasingly blurred boundaries between coaching and related services

• a changing buyer (from a relatively uninformed ‘faith purchaser’ to a more sophisticated and demanding one)

• the commoditisation of coaching

• a wide variation in pricing

Yet, despite these trends, as well as the wide range of supply factors that we described in Chapter 2, the same operating or organisational models for delivering development coaching have emerged as with any other service or consultancy business.