The increased interest in coaching supervision has captured an increasing level of interest from coaching industry associations such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF), European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC), Worldwide Association of Business Coaches (WABC), Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA) and the Association for Coaching (AC).

The drive behind this is a desire to more effectively differentiate coaching from other helping professions, and to build the level of professionalism for those who work in the industry.

As things stand, anyone can set up in business and call themselves a coach, without the training and experience needed to undertake this role with the expertise needed.

Some might argue that coaching is simply helping people focus on what they want and then holding them accountable for achieving these results. Simple as it sounds, there is a lot more to the coaching relationship than that. Coaches are finding the need to draw on an increasingly diverse range of knowledge from disciplines such as Adult Learning, Positive Psychology and in a business context Organisational Development, Systems Theory, Business Strategy.

I strongly support a focus on education, building the knowledge base of coaching and exploring new ways to work with clients. From an experience perspective, while I may have been coaching for over 20 years without knowing it, the more I learn, the more I understand what my specific strengths and capabilities are the more I understand when I need to call on the expertise of others.

Coaching will continue to grow as a profession – of that I have no doubt. For those of us seeking to influence the growth and development of coaching development of coaching and to support the ongoing development of coaching practitioners through supervision and reflective proactive, a solid evidence-base of knowledge will be a key success factor.