Executive coaching has become a well-established tool amongst senior business leaders looking to develop themselves personally and professionally. Alongside this, a body of literature has emerged which examines executive coaching best practices, the executive coaching relationship, and the outcomes achieved by executive coaching. This body of work providing strong evidence of efficacy in coaching begs the question: how can coaching approaches foster personal development in other contexts and environments?

Coaching emerging adults (defined as people in their late teens to mid-twenties in industrialised societies) in an educational setting is not necessarily a novel idea. Coaching emerging adults in higher education has typically focused on two domains: remedial academic coaching for low performing students, or employability coaching designed to place students in careers. These two domains adopt a transactional and didactic approach in order to achieve specific, predefined outcomes, and are successful in doing so. Despite the success in these narrow domains, the wide-ranging benefits of a more holistic, developmental coaching approach with a broader scope (as adopted in executive settings) has not yet been achieved, nor documented in the literature.

At Hult, we have adopted a hands-on, skills-focused experiential curriculum. In order to develop students fully, and to allow them to extract learning from such a curriculum, we implemented a holistic developmental coaching program in 2022. This paper documents the experiences of both coaches and coachees who participate in this program. We provide an empirical foundation for further study of developmental coaching approaches in emerging adults participating in higher education.

Through focus groups, this paper qualitatively documents these experiences and provides empirical evidence of how a developmental coaching approach can be applied to personal development of emerging adults. An inductive thematic analysis of these focus groups revealed three key themes: a need for ‘directiveness’ on the part of the coach when coaching emerging adults, the importance of chemistry and an effective coach-coachee match, and the unique challenges of coaching within an institutional context – such as role clarity, student engagement, and perception of coaching.

These findings present an early insight into how coaching approaches can be applied within educational environments working with emerging adults. Further inquiry is needed to assess each of these themes in further detail. In particular, the need for ‘directiveness’ when working with emerging adults challenges existing narratives of coaching and established coaching practices.

Keywords: Coaching, development, skills, mindsets, personalised, education, emerging adults