Let me share a little history about the coaching and mentoring scene in the past and why our Postgraduate Diploma is so relevant to the organisational world now. As well as being more contemporary and appropriate than many alternative programmes, it focuses particularly on a practical and pertinent agenda to suit current organisational and consultancy needs.
In 2002, when Sheffield Hallam University first launched their MSc in Coaching and Mentoring, the sector was in a very different place. The term coaching still had a strong association with sports coaching and instruction, and the term ‘executive coaching’ was becoming increasingly popular as a way of differentiating the term in a broader organisational environment. At this time, executive coaching was seen, as being primarily for senior leaders and managers and predominantly in large private sector organisations.
Formal mentoring became popular in both the corporate and public sectors in most of the wealthy industrialised nations of the world during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet the skilful application of using mentoring strategically within organisations was still practically unheard of at the turn of the century.
The development of coaching
Coaching was also seen as a development pathway for those same senior leaders and managers to become executive coaches themselves and to be able to charge significant fees and daily rates for their services. Coach education was starting to grow exponentially, with many private consultancies as well as universities offering certificated programmes of coach development, accredited by coaching professional bodies such as the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and the International Coaching Federation.
Completing such a program
me was seen as giving participants a license to practice. This not only attracted more private senior leaders and managers, but also those from other backgrounds and sectors who wished to develop their own nascent consultancy organisations, with one-to-one coaching being the main offer.
An oversupply of coaches
Over time, increased research into coaching along with a significantly increased number of qualified coaches has meant that the coach education market has become much more saturated in terms of supply. Furthermore, there has been an increasing trend over time for organisations to develop their own internal coaching programmes which were seen as a cheaper alternative to employing expert external professional coaches.
As a counterbalance to that oversupply, there has been an increasing recognition of how coaching might be applied in various other aspects of organisational and wider life. Team coaching has become more prevalent as a mode of coaching. Plus, coaching skills themselves have become an essential part of a senior manager’s skill set, not least because they are often required to gain internal promotion by recruiters. Increasingly, there has been talk, in both the academic and practitioner worlds of coaching, about the importance of creating a coaching culture, where coaching, as opposed to instruction/direction, has become much more embedded into the way organisations work.
Complacency around introducing mentoring
With the flourish of mentoring programmes being introduced in all aspects of life, the development of mentoring into organisational settings is seen as commonplace with most HR practitioners feeling they have the expertise to run a programme. The advent of mentoring platforms can create a sheep dip approach to offering mentoring on a large scale. As a result some mentors and mentees can be put off by their experience of structured mentoring.
What’s next for coaching and mentoring?
There is a need now for coaching practitioners to be able to do more than just coach people on a one-to-one basis. Coaching needs to be used to help people understand how they work with difference, rise to the challenge posed by AI and to deal with the practical, ethical and moral dilemmas that this complexity poses to us as we work in organisations. Clearly, having strong and robust one-to-one coaching skills is foundational to this, but they will not be sufficient in terms of rising to these newer challenges, additional knowledge and skills are required.
Implementing mentoring in a focused way to support some of the biggest challenges facing people in organisations is needed more than ever. Reducing isolation when working from home, supporting better mental health, knowledge productivity with an aging workforce, supporting difference and developing skills to cope with the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible) world we operative within, are all areas that mentoring can support.
Postgraduate Diploma takes a wider and more current view
The Postgraduate Diploma in Coaching and Mentoring for Leadership in Organisations delivered by Coach Mentoring Ltd. in conjunction with Leeds Beckett University, is designed to help participants meet these fresh challenges.
The Diploma best suits those who already have those foundational one-to-one coaching and mentoring skills and who need to make the step to deal with the increasing complexity created in their organisational context.
Building on these skills, the Diploma helps participants to identify and develop the additional skills they need:
- Creating coaching and mentoring cultures;
- Team coaching;
- Working with difference;
- Leveraging AI through coaching;
- Developing coaching and mentoring programmes to support turbulent change, major transition and geopolitical upheaval
- Working with and through the emotional engagement between human beings and their work – to enable their organisations to get the best out of what coaching and mentoring can offer.
Key to this is the development of leaders and leadership. Leaders at all levels in organisations will be needed to help others understand what they need to do to thrive in this new organisational context going forward.
Why choose this Postgraduate Diploma?
Whilst this programme is coaching and mentoring focused and will appeal directly to practitioners already working in the field, it will also help those who want to use these skills more in their day-to-day lives and work. They will be encouraged to understand how coaching and mentoring can be used to help them meet a wide variety of organisational targets and goals.
This is not the typical approach of the majority of programmes, which might simply prepare you to coach. Join our next Postgraduate Diploma programme in January 2027 to develop your coaching and mentoring ability to support your organisation, or your clients, through the current global turbulence and upheaval, which requires a completely different approach.
Does this sound relevant to you? Then don’t waste time, get in contact for a conversation.
