As unemployment climbs, the phenomenon of job coaching appears on the Irish scene. Two people offering free advice services to unemployed people tell GRACE WYNNE-JONESwhat they hope to achieve

A NEW INDUSTRY is springing up on the back of the thousands of people who have lost their jobs due to the recession. Courses advising people how to find work, how to cope with unemployment, and to how to keep their sanity while on the dole are proving very popular.

Two such “job coaches”, Clodagh Hughes and Nial O’Reilly, are offering free coaching to unemployed people as their contribution to get the country get back on its feet.

Hughes, who describes herself as a “business and executive” coach, provides seminars to help the newly unemployed network in more uplifting places than dole queues. She is offering a limited number of places on her twice-monthly coaching seminars for the rest of the year on a first-come-first-served basis, charging €40 to cover room hire and refreshments.

“We are not seeing much from our politicians and others in terms of action and leadership, so I’ve decided to take a wee bit of leadership myself,” she says. “The message I have is: stop moaning about the problems and come up with some solutions, no matter how small they might be. We all have something to offer.”

Hughes’s initiative, which she started in February, is born out of real frustration. She says the new unemployed don’t need help crafting CVs or getting trained in how to interview well or get back to work – politicians need to think more creatively about how to help them.

One man who attended her seminar told her he wanted help to “sort out” his head: “I am sitting in my room with four walls around me and I have this guy in my head saying, ‘it’s all over, I’ll never get a job again I might as well give up’.”

Many of her clients are products of the Celtic Tiger, who immediately got jobs and succeeded, helping them develop “great confidence”.

“I spend a lot of time getting people to understand how they choose to respond to this recession will play a big part in how they get out of it,” Hughes says. “I talk about how the mind works. People like Padraig Harrington, sports stars at the peak of their sporting lives, spend more time looking at what goes on in the six inches between their ears than their physical abilities. They set clear goals about where they want to get to and identify the stuff that holds them back.”

She also stresses the importance of jobless people being ready for when the upturn comes. She doesn’t advise them to spend whole days indoors looking for a job, because that is “an isolating place to be”.

These days the 42-year-old mother of three, who has been a head of marketing at two major financial institutions and lectures on marketing services in UCD, is often called in to push companies into implementing their new strategies. She is also an adviser on the Ideas Campaign, which invited people to contribute ideas to rebuild the Irish economy.

Hughes tells her clients they should look for opportunities in areas they might not have looked at before. She also tells them to set personal goals and to look at other options, including voluntary work, a garden project, a business development plan or a book.

“There is nothing that turns a future employer off more than a person who comes across as downtrodden and dejected. A high achiever whose identity has been wrapped up with past achievement and who has been out of work for a period can be very susceptible to this. The economy will eventually turn. The challenge is to be in the right state of mind when it does.”

NIAL O’REILLY offers free coaching to unemployed people in Galway.

He took voluntary redundancy six years ago from his job as head of operations at Permanent TSB. He was living in Salthill, Galway, but working in St Stephen’s Green. He got to senior management almost by chance. “I didn’t plan for that to happen and when I got there I asked myself the question: ‘do you really want this?’” He decided his true calling lay elsewhere.

Even so, it took him a while to adjust. He recalls breaking out in a cold sweat when he found himself walking down Shop Street in Galway on a Tuesday morning with no tie on. Now he believes people need to free themselves from the pressure of “needing to appear successful”.

He urges people to ask themselves “What challenges me? What do I enjoy? What’s meaningful to me?”

He believes these questions, if answered truthfully, may lead to fulfilling new careers and opportunities. Whatever one’s situation, “find out what you are really good at”, he suggests.

A decision to study business and executive coaching at Smurfit Business School led to him finding what he calls his “sweet spot”. He’d finally found a career that made the most of his key strengths. Today he specialises in facilitating the exploitation of untapped potential in people and teams.

Nial O’Reilly will be giving a free group coaching session for unemployed people in Galway in May. nial@ignitecoach. com, www.ignite coach.com

Clodagh Hughes’s next seminar will be in Killiney Castle Hotel, Co Dublin on May 8. www.motive8.ie, clodagh@motive8.ie