The coaching industry grows steadily, with an increasing number of coaches joining the market globally each year. The professional coaching market is one of the few industries to date that hasn’t experienced a sharp decline. In fact, it boasts an estimated value of over $2.4bn. It’s clear that the benefits of professional coaching are widely recognised.
In today’s global economy, staying abreast of the competition and adapting to the changes of the 4th industrial revolution, means retaining your top talent and developing high value individuals within your company. Coaching is one of the key ways that successful companies are doing this.
Companies have invested in executive and business coaching services, developed their own internal ‘coaches directory’, and many are even upskilling key talent within the organisation with the core skills and competencies of a coach. Interestingly, future trends suggest an 89% prevalence of “leaders-as-coach” training in the workplace by 2022.
While all of this is great news for professional coaches, training institutions, and beneficiaries of coaching programmes, a key part of the coaching, learning and development machine has been left out… until now.
With 2020 well underway, we’re seeing more of an emphasis and desire for credible data on the ROI of coaching interventions. This is unsurprising, given that resources are increasingly scarce and savvy business heads are no longer willing to sign off on learning and development (L&D) initiatives that have no credible ROI attached to it.
Metrics will be a must in the coaching and development space, and forward-thinking companies have already started demanding data and analytics to support coaching effectiveness claims.
For most companies this represents a huge shift in current ways of working when it comes to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of coaching or other L&D programmes. As data and analytics starts taking centre stage in the coaching market, credible coaching data on ROI will prove to be the missing piece of the L&D strategy.
