7 Key Selection Criteria to Choosing the Best Coaching School

1. National & International Accreditation

One question to ask is: Do I really need a certification?

The answer depends on where you’re at in your journey and what you’re expecting to gain out of coaching.

Here are some more questions to consider:

Do you want to quit your current day job and start your own business?
Do you want to train and coach others at workplace?
Do your potential clients consider credentials and certification as an important factor in choosing a coach?

At The Coaching Institute, we offer our students the option to become either internationally recognised with the International Coach Guild or nationally accredited with the RTO, or both.

While most students prefer to become internationally recognised, everyone is different and it is important to choose the right qualification that an institute for life coaching offers so as to meet your needs as a future coach.

2. Face-to-Face Trainings

Like any other endeavour, coaching education takes time and effort. Even when you have options to attend a program online, you’d ideally want to learn and practise coaching with a trainer, face-to-face.

Face-to-face option gives you an opportunity to fully engage and involve in coaching, experience live coaching demonstrations and connect with other like-minded coaches in the community.

Seek out the quality, personality and style of trainers and the overall feel for the program and what comes with it. Look for past students and their testimonials to get an idea about the whole “experience” and whether or not it is the right fit for you.

For example, at The Coaching Institute, you get as a minimum of between 8.5 and 24.5 days of compulsory face-to-face training, plus plenty of other opportunities, at our state-of-the-art campus with Sharon Pearson and Joe Pane, who have a combined coaching and training experience of more than two decades.

And, we also believe that learning should be fun so you’ll find we bring playfulness, humour, and even dancing, on occasion, to our events.

3. Ongoing Access to Materials & Mentors

As a new coach, it is vital to stay connected with like-minded people.

Most quality coach training programs are at least a year to two years long. But what happens once you finish your training?

Coaching is an evolving industry and you want to be able to constantly upgrading your skills and learning new coaching methodologies and models in the industry. It’s what sets you apart from other coaches.

When you’re researching for a coaching program, ask your school if they give you the option to be an “ongoing student” once you finish the course so you can maintain access to all content and resources or reattend trainings at a discounted rate to help you keep up to date.

At TCI, The Masters Academy is all about ongoing Professional Development, keeping coaches connected to the coaching community, so they can have access to exclusive content and world-leading best practices.

4. Guarantees

Given that this pathway leads to emotional, financial and spiritual freedom, your goal should be not only to pick any school that provides you with a coach’s training program, but also one that truly helps you become a successful coach, give you the tools, support and environment to explore and discover your potential.

And then be able to back all this up with a guarantee or a promise.

At TCI, we don’t see the point in teaching you how to be the best coach in the world if we can’t also help you to build a successful and sustainable business out of it.

Our mission is to help create the extraordinary – be it for your life, for family, for your career, your business or whatever matters the most to you. For example, our guarantee is that if, as a result of using our systems and graduating on time, you don’t earn back your entire course investment within 18 months, we will refund your course fees and you get to keep ALL the materials.

5. Client Attraction & Marketing

Let’s face it – you cannot change the world or even one person at a time if you don’t find clients.

Coaching is about running a business as much as it’s about helping others change their lives. As a part of your coaching career, you’re going to need to know how to attract your ideal clients.

It becomes immensely important that the chosen school provides you with a “client attraction system” of sorts, the exact steps of how to find your first paying client as you start your journey.

At The Coaching Institute, we don’t train coaches to “sell” their services; we train them to invite people and experience the value of the conversations through a 7-step blueprint as a part of your coach training program.

In fact, it is so successful that our coaches who have no experience in attracting clients find themselves working with clients within 90 days of enrolling. Of course, if you would like to slowly transition into coaching, that is understandable, but it's great to know that access to proven client attraction methodologies is available.

6. Online Interactive Classes

Choosing to become a life, leadership or business coach gives you the opportunity to create a career where you can really make a difference – and do it on your own terms.

There are no limits to where you can take your career, whether you want to work from home or an office, part-time or full-time, face-to-face or over the phone, with individuals or teams or businesses, helping people to change their lives, to improve their relationships, to correct bad habits, to break through their limits and to realise their full potential – Or you can take it in a completely new direction and apply your skills in ways that have never been thought of. The possibilities are endless.

The best coaching programs allow you to do it all at your own pace, from the comfort of your home.

At TCI, wherever they are in the world, all our students receive ongoing access to classes called ‘webinars’. These are online classes, where you dial in and listen, and they give you the opportunity to participate and interact with specialist facilitators.

The classes run all year, so if you miss a class, you can hear it repeated later. And with classes alternating between lunchtime or evenings, there’s plenty of opportunities to fit them in around work, family and life in general.

7. Number of Coaches Trained & Trainings Ran

A huge factor that comes into play when selecting the right coach training school is their past history.

How many hours of training have they run?
How many coaches have they trained?
What is the combined experience of these trainers?
How many long term success stories do they have?

At The Coaching Institute, we are a little more expensive than some other providers but we also pride ourselves to be the most experienced in the industry, having run the most number of trainings (500 and counting) and trained most number of coaches (6,000 and counting) in the last 12 years.

We also pride ourselves to be the most experienced in the industry, having run the most number of trainings (500 and counting) and trained most number of coaches (6,000 and counting) in the last 12 years.

We also have some extraordinary stories of success from our students whether they’re doing it simply for personal development, to be better in their current job or to build a business they can run from anywhere at any time, so many coaches have been able to Live Their Dream using their TCI training.

Something to Think About…

Not every school is right for you and your values play a huge role in choosing the best.

At TCI, we’re not conservative or bureaucratic in our approach, and we’re sometimes too playful for the “industry standards” or for more serious students.

We believe humour and lightness produces the best coaching results, so we bring this to our training. But it may not be for everyone.

Make sure you’re clear on what you need in a coaching school and speak to their course consultant to get your questions answered and know you’re making a great decision.

At TCI we make a point of getting to know you and how we can support you first before we let you start as a student because we think it is important to find a school that matches your dreams.

Please feel free to give our team a call if you need a hand cutting through the noise to find your best match to start your coaching journey today, or request a Discovery Session at 1800 094 927.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to use the template below to help you compare different schools and leave a comment below on your findings!