The Experienced Coach: An exploration of the coaches learning pathways and developmental influences

Coaching has been established as a Human Resource Development initiative. However, coaching practice and research to-date has been focusing more on executive/leadership coaching outcomes, coaching effectiveness, to understand the ingredients of success factors of coaching. Such emphasis may be largely driven by the coaches and professional bodies' motivation to seek business advantage by justifying return on coaching investments. Emphasis on outcomes for coachees has led to a gap in our understanding of how coaches learn and develop.

Coach development within business context is under-researched (Carden et al., 2022). However, this is an area of increasing interest in training providers and professional bodies. There are an increasing number of coaches around the world continuously exploring ways of improving their practice through learning and development. Often, such development is informed by recognitions of professional bodies who place strong emphasis on coaching competencies (Garvey and Stokes, 2022).  Reliance on competencies can reduce the effectiveness of learning and development of coaches due to its emphasis on few variables that promote professionalism, mastery, results, and ethics (Backchirova and Lawton Smith, 2015; Burt et al., 2024; Garvey, 2011; Garvey, 2024). This requires critically challenging philosophical and theoretical foundations of coaching, learning, and development (Du Toit and Sim, 2010; Hurlow, 2022; Rajasinghe and Fadipe’s, 2026). Doing so may facilitate epistemic justice by critically justifying or disqualifying current practices (Hurllow, 2022).

Moreover, current coach development research focuses on some elements of development such as the changes that coaches witness as they learn theories and develop skills (Atad and Grant, 2021), self-awareness of coaches (Carden et al., 2022). Some scholars (see Jordon et al., 2017) argue that the current coach development evidence are anecdotal and 14 years ago Campone and Awal (2012) suggest that there is lack of understanding of how life experiences impact coach development and Burt et al., (2024) noted the importance of exploring coach development more holistically, through andragogy informed approaches. Moreover, Garvey et al., (2024) assert that taking culture, the content in which occurs, the purpose of coaching engagement, and the clients’ needs and abilities should be considered when reflecting on how coaches learn and develop or planning coach development activities. They also suggest that the current approaches do not fully take these into consideration. Therefore, there is a need to explore this phenomenon more broadly by employing methodological heterogeneity (Passmore and Fillery-Travis, 2011) and innovations (see Rajasinghe et al., 2024) from wider stakeholder perspectives such as professional bodies, coaches, coach educators, and researchers. Such explorations will have an impact on our understanding of how coaches learn and develop to become professional coaches and inform coach development pedagogies, policies and practices of professional bodies and training providers.

Supervisors

Dr Duminda Rajasinghe

Claire Taylor

Dr Mel Bull