In this series, we reflect on the insights shared with us by Animas alumni, drawing out experiences and lessons that may help both practising coaches and those considering becoming a coach.
When people are considering coach training, they often feel they should already understand the professional journey that comes afterwards. Which credential should I aim for? How soon should I start thinking about it? Will I need one to work professionally? Should I have a plan before I even qualify?
Those questions are understandable, but they can create unnecessary pressure very early in the journey. Whilst it’s useful to know that credentialing exists, and that courses can lead into credentials, you don’t necessarily need to have it all mapped out before you even start. For many coaches the credentialing pathway becomes clearer once you’re actually practising and beginning to understand the kind of work you want to do.
Qualification is the beginning of another stage
There’s a temptation to think of qualification as the point at which you’ve “become a coach” and everything that follows is simply about finding clients. In reality, qualification usually marks the end of one stage and the beginning of another.
You’ve learned the foundations, practised, developed enough competence to work professionally and begun to understand the principles that underpin your coaching. But you’re still discovering what kind of coach you are, the environments you want to work in, the clients you’re drawn to and how you want your practice to develop.
This was the experience for Animas aluma, Alisa Salaman. Her credentialing journey didn’t begin straight after qualification, but around eighteen months later when a coaching platform she was working with asked her to gain an ACC credential, and at that point credentialing shifted from being something abstract in the background to something connected to a real professional opportunity.
That distinction matters because the relevance of credentials often depends on the kind of work you want to do. A coach working privately with their own clients may experience that differently from someone who wants to work through coaching platforms, corporate programmes or organisations with established procurement standards.
The useful question therefore isn’t always, “How quickly should I get credentialed?” It may be more helpful to ask, “What kind of work am I moving towards, and what will that work ask of me?”
You don’t need to have the whole plan
One of the more reassuring aspects of Alisa’s story is that the path wasn’t fully planned from the beginning.
There can be a tendency, particularly among experienced professionals entering coaching, to want to understand every stage before starting. We’re used to career paths with clearer progression, job descriptions and recognised markers of advancement, so it’s natural to want the same certainty here.
Coaching careers are often less linear. You may qualify and start by coaching within your existing organisation, build a small private practice alongside another role, or discover that you’re drawn towards leadership coaching, group coaching, or something you hadn’t expected. Opportunities can appear that change what becomes professionally useful.
Credentialing can sit within that evolving picture rather than needing to dictate it from the outset. Not knowing your eventual route at the start doesn’t mean you’re underprepared; it simply means some decisions are better made once you have enough experience to know what will be important.
Credentialing can become part of the learning
For Alisa, working towards an ICF credential didn’t feel purely administrative. The process brought her into a mentoring cohort with other coaches at a similar stage. There was peer connection, reciprocal coaching, observed practice and feedback, and at a point when coaching could feel quite solitary, that gave her a sense of being part of a wider professional community.
This broader experience of learning and connection can be a useful way to think about credentialing, because the word itself can make the process sound bureaucratic. It can appear to be about proving what you’ve already done rather than developing what you do next, but in practice the learning can be substantial.
Having your coaching observed changes the way you listen to your own practice. Feedback can reveal habits you hadn’t noticed, strengths you hadn’t recognised and areas where your intention and impact don’t quite match. Mentor coaching creates another space in which the coach becomes the learner again, and that can be particularly valuable after qualification, when the immediate structure of training has gone and you’re beginning to develop more independently.
A credentialing process can interrupt your usual practise by asking you to look again at how you work.
The relevance of credentials changes with your career
After gaining her initial ACC credential, Alisa continued to grow, gaining her PCC and then MCC. Her reflections on this journey suggest that each stage had a different developmental quality.
As her experience grew, the focus became less about demonstrating coaching capability and more about subtler aspects of practice.
For some coaches, progression through the credential levelers will become central to their ongoing development. For others, it may be less important depending on the work they choose to do, and they may be satisfied to stay at the credential level that enables them to do the work they enjoy. And that’s okay. The point isn’t that every coach must pursue the same route, but that credentialing tends to become most meaningful when it’s connected to professional purpose, or a designated pathway of learning.
That’s a useful distinction for newer coaches. If the goal becomes only “getting the credential”, it’s easy to experience the process as another professional hurdle. If the credential becomes a structure for continued learning, the experience can look very different. The designation matters, but so does the coach you become while working towards it.
You can think about credentials without rushing towards them
Prospective coaches don’t need to ignore credentialing until years after qualification. It’s useful to know that professional credentials exist, that some types of work may expect them, and that they can form part of a longer professional journey.
But awareness is different from urgency. There’s no need to have every stage mapped out before you’ve begun training, and there’s little value in making decisions about a future coaching career before you’ve had enough experience to know what kind of career you actually want.
As your practice develops, you’ll understand more clearly which professional doors you want to open, which standards matter in those spaces, and what you want to learn from the credentialing journey.
