"A skills inventory and assessment with a coach, that is an opportunity to look back at one's career path so far: jobs held, our skills, our strengths & weaknesses, sometimes to think about what is important in one's work (environment, status, values, capabilities, technical, desires, needs).

Tests, discussions, exercises: the range of tools used varies and is tailor-made.
Beware: the coach is neither a doctor nor a psychologist nor an assessor of bad and good points. The coach is a partner who suggests exercises, provides food for thought, finds options, stimulates us when we hesitate, opens doors and drops hints.

The coach does not tell truths, it is everyone's role to image and find them. One should not expect from it revolutions or astounding revelations but instead confirmations, a prioritised list of our desires, our values, our skills, our needs and sometimes words on things that we know and feel.

I am personally in the middle of this exercise, I do not yet know what I shall do with it, but one thing that I know is that I have to do it for the time being so as to provide and take the time to think about what - whatever one's opinion is - represents a good third of our daily life."

Other Candidate :

" After 14 years with only one employer in the banking sector, I was suddenly without a job. I realized that in order to find a new job I needed to prepare myself. And I knew that I couldn't do that alone. After so much time out of the market place, I had no idea how to write a curriculum, or how to prepare an interview, and I had serious doubts about my marketability in a competitive industry. Dionne told me from the very beginning that I was going to be surprised at how many things I could do.

After an initial interview where a lot of questions were asked on both sides, we started to work together in a very systematic and thorough way to verbalize all those skills that I had hidden away inside me; and as I verbalized them and became comfortable with them in my context, we organized them and wrote them down. This became the basis of my CV which grew to be the essence of who I was as an agent in the marketplace. And once my curriculum was acceptable to me, we worked on interview questions, we role-played and did mock interviews.

The experience of being coached by someone towards a very specific goal, which involved some difficult thinking on my part and a lot of patient probing on Dionne's, was very positive. It got the job done. And it got me the job."