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CliftonStrengths
Why Career Coaching Helps College Students
CliftonStrengths

Why Career Coaching Helps College Students

Webcast Details

  • Gallup Called to Coach Webcast Series
  • Season 5, Episode 3
  • Learn how a retired Indian army officer is using his strengths and some innovative tools he has developed to coach college students, individually and in groups.

On a recent Called to Coach, we spoke with Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach Satyendra Kumar.

Satyendra (Saty) Kumar is the founder and CEO of SATYSSPARKS, a strengths coaching business in India. Saty's business develops strengths and career guidance tools to make it easier to introduce and apply strengths for students and professor. He has seen many students thrive after receiving coaching around their strengths. He says students who learn their Top 5 start to understand how to prepare for the career they have chosen, or even how to choose their coursework and major to better suit their strengths.

Saty is a retired Indian army officer who began working as a part-time faculty member at Christ University, Bangalore and running his own strengths coaching company after he retired. He read the book Strengths Based Leadership, discovered his CliftonStrengths, and realized he's been using his strengths throughout his childhood and whole life, but didn't have words for it. He went through Gallup's strengths coaching certification course and started coaching his university students and other professors around strengths.

Here are the notes from the webcast:

What are some of your coaching innovations?

Saty has developed 4 modules:

  1. Individualized coaching; one-on-one or in a group
  2. Team coaching -- use Smart City background; team comes together based on their strengths
  3. Leadership coaching -- how do you achieve the 4 needs
  4. Personality development -- highlight goal setting and goal actualization; set, plan and achieve SMART goals; emotional intelligence

Other innovative tools that are under development:

  • "10 sentences that will describe you best" -- given to individuals, useful in interviews
  • Career planning guide -- given to students
  • Small pouch that contains highlighter, pen, Gallup photos (spiral bound), theme insight cards, theme dynamics cards, value cards, and a ruler
  • Small laminated card with Top 5 on one side, values on the other; can fit in pocket
  • Also cover Communications -- students get a poster showing how can you deliver your strengths using your 5 senses
  • EQ diagram

What's next for Saty?

  • Saty is expanding his business to other universities to run programs that start students with strengths at the beginning of their studies.
  • He also plans to focus on millennials and strengths-based project management.

How do you see your personal coaching scaling?

Currently, Saty has a team of four people. He is the only certified coach; he plans to develop more coaches that will coach with his methodology and tools.

Saty Kumar's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Learner, Achiever, Strategic, Arranger and Input.

Gallup-Certified Strengths Coaches Cheryl Pace and Heather Riddick contributed to this post.

Learn more about using CliftonStrengths to help yourself and others succeed:


Gallup https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/250376/default.aspx
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