If you’re considering coaching, you probably want to know what actually happens. Not the marketing version — the real version. What changes, what doesn’t, and where the limits are.
I’m writing this because when I was considering coaching training, I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to these questions anywhere. Everything was either too vague (“coaching helps you reach your full potential”) or too grandiose (“coaching will change your life”). Neither is useful if you’re an engineer who wants to know what you’re buying.
Part of the problem was me. I didn’t know what coaching was either. I’d assumed it was about helping people. It isn’t. It’s about creating the right conditions for people to help themselves.
What coaching does
Coaching basically gives you thinking time with structure. That sounds simple. It’s not.
Most mid-career professionals, especially women in STEM, spend their working lives solving other people’s problems. Coaching is possibly the only time someone sits across from you and says: “What do you actually want? And what’s in the way?” Then we make sure we get to the real answer, behind all the ‘should dos’ and conditioning.
Based on the research and my own training, the outcomes that show up most consistently are:
Career clarity
Not “finding your passion”. Working out whether the organisation you’re in can give you what you need, and if not, what the realistic alternatives are.
Better decisions
The Frontiers in Psychology meta-analysis (2023) found coaching’s largest effect is on what people do, and above all on whether they reach the goals they set. For someone weighing up whether to push for promotion, move sideways, or leave, the quality of that decision matters more than almost anything else.
Action
This is the difference between coaching and having a good conversation with a friend. You decide what you’ll do between sessions and how you’ll know you’ve done it. The next session starts there. In one coaching provider’s own survey, 71% of coachees said coaching had positively affected their desire to stay with their organisation, including some who’d had only four sessions.
Negotiation and visibility
Women in STEM are consistently undervalued in terms of pay and recognition. The Lovelace Report found that more than 60% of women with 6–20 years’ tenure earn below the £100,000 benchmark for their level. Coaching helps you work out what you’re worth and then actually ask for it. Not in a “lean in” way. In a strategic, evidence-based way. It then gives you somewhere to practise until you’re comfortable having that conversation.
What coaching doesn’t do
Fix your organisation
If the culture is broken, coaching won’t repair it. What it will do is help you see the situation clearly enough to decide whether to stay and push for change, or leave on your own terms. Both are valid decisions. The point is that you’re making a positive choice, not drifting or running away.
Turn you into someone else
Coaching isn’t a personality transplant. The biggest shift the evidence shows is in behaviour — how you negotiate, how you manage your visibility, how you make career decisions. It moves self-belief and resilience too, less so but measurably. For most mid-career women in STEM, the problem isn’t who they are. It’s that they’ve been absorbing the cost of a system that wasn’t designed for them, and they need help working out what to do about it.
Coaching helps you find the best version of yourself, rather than force-fitting you in.
Replace therapy
Coaching works with people who are fundamentally functioning well but stuck, or at a crossroads. If you’re dealing with depression, anxiety, burnout at a clinical level, or the after-effects of serious workplace bullying or harassment, a coach should recognise that and refer you to someone qualified to help. A good coach knows where that line is and doesn’t cross it.
My Henley training spent a lot of time on this, and for good reason. A well-intentioned coach who starts dabbling in counselling without the skills and experience for it can do real harm. Referring you on isn’t the coach giving up; it’s them doing the job properly.
Give you advice
This often confuses people. A coach isn’t there to give you solutions; their job is to help you work out what you want to do. Finding and implementing your own next steps is better, as you have more context and history to the problem at hand. The confidence from creating your own successful approach yourself stays with you far longer than me handing you a ready-made answer.
That said, I bring 20 years of engineering experience to the conversation. I understand the dynamics of STEM organisations, I’ve seen the patterns, and when something in your situation connects to something recognise, I’ll say so. I’m not going to sit there pretending I don’t have relevant experience. But the decisions are yours.
How long it takes
Most coaching programmes run 3–6 months, with sessions every fortnight or monthly. That’s not arbitrary. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study found that each month of its six-month programme contributed an additional 2% boost. You don’t get the full benefit from a single session, and you shouldn’t expect to.
In practical terms, most people start to notice a shift around sessions 3- 4. Not a dramatic change. More like the fog clearing. You start seeing your situation with less emotion and more strategy. By the end of a programme, you should have a clear plan, at least one concrete change you’ve already made, and the ability to keep making good decisions without a coach in the room.
The question to ask before you start
The most useful question isn’t “will coaching work?” It’s “am I ready to do something with it?” Coaching requires you to be honest about what you want, and prepared to act on it between sessions. If you want someone to listen sympathetically and tell you it’s not your fault, that’s a friend. If you want someone to help you work out what to do next, and then get past what’s in the way of you doing it, that’s a coach.
If you want to see the evidence behind coaching, the peer-reviewed research rather than the industry marketing, I’ve written a separate piece on that: [Does Coaching Actually Work? What the Evidence Says].
Sally Purdie CEng FIMMM — Chartered Engineer | STEM Retention Coach
References
Dion Leadership (2024) Coaching Effectiveness Study. Available at: https://dionleadership.com/leadership-coaching-effectiveness-research-study/ (Accessed: 12 September 2026).
Melin, J.L. and Correll, S.J. (2022) ‘Preventing soft skill decay among early-career women in STEM during COVID-19: Evidence from a longitudinal intervention’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(32), e2123105119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2123105119.
Nicolau, A., Candel, O.S., Constantin, T. and Kleingeld, A. (2023) ‘The effects of executive coaching on behaviors, attitudes, and personal characteristics: a meta-analysis of randomized control trial studies’, Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1089797. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797.
Oliver Wyman and WeAreTechWomen (2025) The 2025 Lovelace Report. Available at: https://wearetechwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-Lovelace-Report.pdf (Accessed: 12 September 2026).
