How career mentors help clients create opportunities

It didn't take long for Kenesha Thompson, 24, to figure out that she wanted to be her own boss.

"I don't like working for other people," says Thompson, who has worked for a couple of nonprofit groups since getting her associate degree and never quite felt content. "There's always rules or regulations that I may not agree with. I always like freedom of choice and expression, and not all jobs allow that."

She might not have done anything about it, though, if a friend's girlfriend hadn't mentioned a mysterious free opportunity: A pilot program run by something called the "Outlook Refinery," which promised to help her determine how to strike out on her own. Thompson filled out an online form and within a couple of weeks, was notified that she had been accepted.

The person at the other end of the online form was a woman who also is striking out on her own, to start a career-transition planning business from scratch. Judy O'Babatunde, 27, had a degree in fashion merchandising and had spent time as a social work case manager for young women in transitional housing. She left her job in March 2014 to plan her next step, and decided to focus on helping people who were not seeking to advance in their jobs, but rather to leave them altogether.

"What we work on is working with disgruntled workers who would like to enter into independent venturehood," says O'Babatunde, using the royal "we" - the business is hers alone, funded mostly through savings. "Mentally, they're like, 'I'm done. I've checked out.' There's a feeling in their head that's like, 'I'm not satisfied.' "

More and more people are turning to coaches for help with that kind of crisis.

The coaching occupation grew more prominent in the mid-1990s to meet the demand for an alternative to traditional mental health counseling, which carried some stigma for the high-powered business people who wanted to pursue it. Unlike mental-health professions, coaching had no government-mandated qualifications (educational or licensing requirements) and the field grew quickly - especially when practitioners realized they could charge as much as $300 a session, about double the going rate for talk therapy.

Coaching has thrived in tech booms, says David Reile, the Maryland-based managing director of a coaching agency called the Career Development Alliance. "You have people looking around and saying, 'Wait a minute, there are others making a ton of money, and I'm not,' " Reile says. " 'So what's going on, and how do I change?' "

A wealth of resources has become available to help people turn an idea into a business or a nonprofit, from startup incubators to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. With the growth of online platforms that let people market themselves to a large audience, it's much easier for people to operate independently, and they sometimes seek help to get started.

Also fueling growth: Coaching is open to anybody. A prospective coach can get a certification from the International Coach Federation - worldwide, there are about 17,500 ICF-certified coaches - but there is no legal requirement for training. O'Babatunde graduated from a coaching program at Fielding Graduate University, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. She says she designed her approach to be more directed than typical coaching and less prescriptive than consulting, in which clients are seeking help with specific tasks.

"I put a name on it myself, because I was like, let me look at what I'm doing," O'Babatunde says.

That niche may be particularly fertile in Washington, with its concentration of educated people toiling within large bureaucracies. The city hosts the largest ICF chapter in the country, but coaches tend to be "leadership" or "executive" coaches who train people to become better managers.

Instead, O'Babatunde hopes to find more people like Thompson, who has been dreaming of starting her own nonprofit group to mentor and support youths who face some of the problems she did, including several years spent homeless in her late teens and early 20s.

"I kind of always had the community I wanted to work with," Thompson says. "But I didn't know exactly how to build on it. I had this idea for a while, but I kind of felt lost."

Thompson still doesn't know exactly what steps she'll take to launch her nonprofit, or when. She is only two months into O'Babatunde's experimental program, which could last as long as seven months, depending on how much progress the client feels he or she has made. In their biweekly meetings, O'Babatunde has asked Thompson to flesh out the plan for her nonprofit and has assigned her some reading. Thompson says it has helped her focus her ideas - even if the end of the process means getting more experience, or going back to school.

"What skills do you have? What skills do you not have?" O'Babatunde says. "It ends with education."

The approach works for goals other than nonprofits. O'Babatunde's pitch has attracted people such as V.N. Francis, 35, an urban planner who works for a consulting firm and hopes to find clients as an independent contractor.

"She knows how to tap into that creative part of your brain," Francis says of O'Babatunde. "I need some jumper cables."

The other people in O'Babatunde's first batch of pro bono clients include a real estate agent who wants to get into affordable housing in some capacity, and an academic looking to foster global women's education. When O'Babatunde is finished with this round, she says she might launch the program for paying customers, or do another pilot focused on people further down the entrepreneurship path, like she will be at that point.

But before that, she wants to get her class of guinea pigs on the road to independence.

"It's hard when you go into work and you go to hand in your two weeks' notice," she says. "But what they end up with is a solid mission and a vision."