The key challenge facing the coaching industry is the number of untrained individuals who describe themselves as practitioners, which is generating confusion in the marketplace.
The sector has now become a nearly $2 billion industry, with around 47,500 professionals practising their craft on a global basis.
These are the key findings of a survey commissioned by The International Coach Federation and undertaken by the International Survey Unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers last year among more than 12,000 coaches from 117 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.
Some 43% of respondents said that they were concerned by how many untrained people referred to themselves as coaches, while three out of 10 were anxious about the current confusion in the market.
But 36% pointed out that awareness of the benefits of coaching was on the rise, while 28% were pleased at the increase in the amount of credible data on the return on investment/return on expectations to be derived from the training approach.
On the issue of regulation, a majority of coaches (53%) believed that the profession should be regulated, while 23% were against. Among those who were in the former category or who were unsure, 84% felt that professional coaching bodies were best placed to do the job.
