About the Life and Career Institute

Why we exist

Coaching is unregulated in most countries. Anybody can call themselves a life coach, a career coach or a manifestation coach tomorrow, which is freeing until you are the one asking a stranger to trust you with something that matters to them. People who want to do this work properly face an odd choice. On one side is free advice scattered across a hundred articles, and on the other are programs priced like a postgraduate course. We built the middle option, which is structured written training at a price a new coach can justify, ending in a credential somebody can check.

We built 3 pathways, one each for life, career and manifestation coaching, each 10 units long. They share a structure and a standard, but not a syllabus, because a client choosing between two job offers and a client trying to stop a belief from running their week need different things from a coach.

What coaching actually asks of you

Most people come to coaching because they are good with people. That matters, but it is not the job. The job is running a session so the client does the thinking, asking the question that moves rather than the one that interests you, and ending each hour with something the client will act on before you meet again. It is also knowing where coaching stops. When a client's difficulty belongs with a therapist, a doctor or a lawyer, a good coach says so and refers, rather than carrying on.

Where new coaches usually go wrong is not the coaching. It is everything around it. They describe their work so broadly that nobody recognizes themselves in it, sell single sessions that never add up to a result, set a price they cannot say out loud, and wait for an online audience to arrive instead of telling the people who already know them. Each course spends as much care on those decisions as on the sessions themselves.

How the courses teach

Every unit is written, not filmed, so you can reread a paragraph instead of scrubbing through a video. Each unit follows fictional clients through real coaching problems as worked examples, then gives you a practice quiz and written assignments that ask you to apply what you read to a client or to your own practice. The first six units of each course cover the coaching itself and the offer you build from it. The last four cover starting the practice, the technology and website behind it, marketing, and keeping clients through to a proper ending.

Each course ends in an open-book exam with multiple-choice questions and short written answers. The multiple choice is scored automatically. The written answers are read by a person, who is checking that you can apply the material to a situation rather than recall it, and who leaves notes if you fall short. The competencies each exam checks are listed unit by unit on our certification standards page.

What the credential is, and what it is not

Passing earns you a named designation for that course, with a certificate carrying a verification ID that anyone can check. It shows that you completed structured training and passed an assessed exam. It is not a license, because no license exists for coaching, and it is not accredited by the International Coaching Federation or any other outside body. Some of our graduates later pursue an ICF credential, and we would rather you knew the difference now than found out from a client.

Who this is for, and who it is not for

The courses suit people starting out who want a clear, practical foundation, and people who already coach informally and want structure and a credential behind what they do. Teachers, managers, nurses, recruiters and human resources professionals often find much of their experience carries straight over. They also suit anyone who learns well by reading and writing at their own pace.

They are not the right choice if you need an ICF-accredited program for an employer or a corporate contract, if you want live group classes and supervised practice with other students, or if you are hoping to work with mental health conditions, which is the work of a licensed therapist rather than a coach. If you are unsure, read our guide on how to become a life coach orhow to become a career coach first.

We are fully online by design, which keeps the price down, and every course is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you have a question before you enroll, or at any point after,get in touch and a person will answer.

What makes us different