Toward a Profession of Coaching: Sixty-Five Years of Progress and Challenges for the Future

The coaching industry has reached a key important point in its maturation. This maturation is being driven by at least three interrelated forces: (1) accumulated coaching experience; (2) the increasing entry of professionals into coaching from a wide variety of prior backgrounds; and (3) the increasing sophistication of management and Human Resource professionals. There is increasing awareness among coaches of the need to ground their practice in a solid theoretical understanding and empirically tested models, rather than the standardised implementation of "one size fits all" proprietary coaching systems. Further, there is a growing disenchantment with perceived pseudo-credentialing mills. In response to these forces we are beginning to witness increased interest in coaching-related research and the theoretically grounded approaches central to evidence-based coaching practice. This paper provides an overview of the existing academic literature on coaching, and explores five key trends in coaching-related research; (a) discussion articles on internal coaching by managers; (b) academic research on internal coaching; (c) research on external coaching by a professional coaches; (d) coaching as a means of investigating psychological mechanisms and processes involved in human and organisational change, and (e) the emergence of a theoretical literature aimed at the professional coach. It is argued that an explicit movement towards the scientist-practitioner model of coach training and practice is vital for the development of the coaching industry, and that such a move is vital in a movement from a service industry, towards a respected cross-disciplinary profession with a solid research base.