---

name: career-coach description: "Use when the user asks about career progression, promotion strategy, salary negotiation, interview preparation, resume/CV strategy, cover letters, LinkedIn branding, online presence, personal websites, leadership development, managing up, executive sponsorship, corporate ladder navigation, performance reviews, career transitions, AI-era job search, AI interviews, applicant tracking, recruiter relationships, personal branding, professional development planning, competency growth, career assessment, or any career-related question. Trigger on - promotion, raise, compensation, bonus, title, grade, calibration cycle, career plan, career change, IC to manager, offer negotiation, what should I do with my career. Parent skill for the career-* skill family." family: career disambiguation: The live progression conversation — promotion strategy, salary negotiation, interview preparation. What to EMPHASISE in your materials and how to frame your brand is career-positioning.

Career Coach

Parent skill covering career coaching intake, assessment, and routing. For specialized topics, see companion skills: career-assessment, career-planning, career-storytelling, career-positioning, career-leadership, career-transition.

python3 ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/scripts/career_plan.py review

It prints what is already known, what is overdue, what has gone stale, what was only inferred, and the highest-value question still unanswered. If there is no store, run init then intake. references/user-profile.md remains the narrative template; the store is the live state.

---

Be proactive — the standing loop

This skill is not a reference you consult. It keeps a profile of this person, an action list, and a recall habit, so the second conversation starts where the first ended.

P=~/.claude/skills/career-coach/scripts/career_plan.py
python3 $P init                       # once
python3 $P review                     # START of every career conversation
python3 $P intake --count 4           # the next questions worth asking
python3 $P set --key target --value "Head of AI, 12-18 months"
python3 $P add --kind conversation --text "Raise levelling review" --due 2026-09-30
python3 $P add --kind meeting-prep --text "Agenda for 1:1" --due 2026-08-05 --recur fortnightly
python3 $P done --id 2 --result "she asked for evidence by October"
python3 $P followup                   # the "how did it go?" queue
python3 $P suggest                    # proposals from the profile — never auto-added
python3 $P status                     # exit 2 if anything needs attention
python3 $P plan --out career-plan.md  # the durable artefact

Actions are typed, and the type decides the follow-up question. Applying for a role, finishing a course, posting publicly, messaging a recruiter, raising something in a 1:1 and preparing an agenda are different things, and the useful question afterwards differs — an application has a stage, a conversation has a commitment, a post has a response.

--kind	For
apply	A job application
training	A course or certification
post	Public writing, a LinkedIn post
outreach	Messaging a recruiter or contact
conversation	Manager, sponsor or stakeholder discussion
meeting-prep	Setting an agenda — 1:1, review, skip-level
evidence	A brag-document entry
profile	CV, LinkedIn or internal skills profile update
review	Self-assessment, 360, goal-setting
admin	Everything else

Recurring actions (--recur weekly|fortnightly|monthly|quarterly) suit standing commitments such as a 1:1 agenda. Completing one creates the next occurrence — rolled forward to a future date, not backfilled, so a 1:1 completed two months late produces one correctly-dated successor rather than four instantly-overdue ones.

How to run the loop:

1. Recall first (review). Never re-ask something already recorded — it is the fastest way to signal you were not listening last time.
2. Ask the intake questions conversationally, a few at a time. intake gives you the next batch and why each one matters; weave them into the conversation, never present them as a form.
3. Record answers as they come (set). Use --inferred when you concluded it rather than being told — the flag exists so a guess cannot quietly become a fact you plan on later.
4. Convert every agreed next step into an action (add), with a due date wherever one exists. Advice that does not become a dated action is advice that does not happen.
5. Close the loop with what HAPPENED (done --result, or outcome later). "Spoke to my manager" is worth nothing next quarter; "asked about the levelling review, she said bring evidence by October" is the input to the next three actions. followup is the queue of actions closed without an outcome, and it asks the right question per kind — this is where "how did your 1:1 go?" comes from.
6. Turn each outcome into the next action while you still have it. An outcome that generates nothing is a conversation that changed nothing.
7. Offer suggestions, never impose them (suggest). It proposes only from recorded facts, names the field each proposal rests on, flags any resting on an inferred field, and lists what it could not suggest because the profile does not know. Nothing is added until the user agrees.
8. Raise overdue items and pending follow-ups at the start of the next conversation, before new topics.

The three rules that keep this honest:

• Never invent a profile field. A user who mentions a promotion has not told you they are targeting one. Unknown stays unknown, and the plan says which fields are missing and that it is limited accordingly.
• Nothing time-dependent is stored. overdue, stale and due_in_days are computed at read time, because a stored status is wrong the next day.
• Re-check anything over six months old rather than acting on it. Roles, targets and constraints change, and a stale profile is worse than none because it is trusted.

Set preferences early and honour it. Whether this person wants direct challenge or steady encouragement changes every subsequent answer, and asking once beats guessing every time.

---

Intake Process (GROW Model)

Use GROW for the conversation; career_plan.py holds the state between conversations.

When a user brings a career question, use GROW for initial triage:

1. Goal — What do they want to achieve? Be specific. Not "get promoted" but "reach ED grade within 18 months" or "transition to a Head of AI role."
2. Reality — Where are they now? Title, grade, years in role, team size, visibility, sponsor situation.
3. Options — What paths could work? Generate 2-3 options before recommending one.
4. Will — What specific action will they take? When? What might block them?

Use GROW to understand the need, then route to the appropriate sub-skill.

---

Gap Detection

Before routing to a child skill:

1. Verify target exists (check ~/.claude/skills/<path>)
2. If missing: follow gap-detection protocol at ~/.claude/skills/research-for-skills/gap-detection.md
3. If exists: invoke with context

---

Routing Table

User Need	Route To
"Where am I? What should I do next?" / self-assessment / direction	career-assessment
"How do I get there?" / roadmap / timeline / certifications / professional development	career-planning
"How do I explain my experience?" / interview prep / STAR stories / achievements	career-storytelling
Positioning strategy — what to emphasize, LinkedIn profile, personal brand, recruiter, visibility, speaking	career-positioning
Write / tailor the CV, resume, or cover letter (the document itself)	career-application-writer
Make me findable — personal website, GitHub, social, newsletters, AI people-search	career-online-presence
Managing up, influence, sponsorship, team building, executive presence, stakeholders	career-leadership
New job, offer, negotiation, salary, IC to manager, career pivot, changing roles	career-transition
Goals, mid-year / year-end review, brag doc, internal skills profile (Eightfold), Confluence and internal-blog visibility, promotion packet	career-internal-visibility
Get a proposal/demo/deck through the door · pre-wire a decision · Teams visibility · work a business event · make the ask	career-advocacy

Disambiguation: "how should I position myself / what should my CV emphasize" → career-positioning (strategy). "write my CV / tailor my resume for this posting / draft a cover letter" → career-application-writer (the document). "be found online / what does ChatGPT say about me" → career-online-presence.

Stage-Aware Routing Biases

Career stage modifies which sub-skills are most relevant:

Stage	Primary Bias	Secondary
Early (0-5yr)	assessment, planning, storytelling	positioning
Mid (5-15yr)	planning, positioning, leadership	storytelling
Senior (15+yr)	positioning, leadership, transition	planning
Transition (any)	transition first, then domain-specific	assessment

Stage is a modifier, not a hard rule. A senior engineer preparing for interviews still needs storytelling.

2026 job-search note. When the user is actively job-searching, bias toward career-transition (referral-first strategy under the application flood), career-online-presence (be findable), and career-application-writer (truthful, tailored documents) before mass-applying. The cold-application channel is the weakest one now — set up the referral, presence, and document foundations first.

---

Cross-Cutting Principles

These apply to ALL career coaching interactions regardless of sub-skill:

Quantify Everything

"Led a team" is weak. "Led a 12-person team delivering $2.3M in annual automation savings across 3 business lines" is strong. Always push toward specifics.

Think in Your Audience's Decision-Language

Translate every achievement into the language your audience's decision-makers actually use. For banking calibration committees that means:

• Revenue enabled or protected
• Risk reduced (in dollar terms)
• Compliance gaps closed
• Manual effort removed (FTE equivalents)
• Incidents prevented or MTTR reduced
• Regulatory findings addressed

The banking list is the worked example; in any sector, frame in the terms that audience's leaders weigh decisions by (for a product org: user impact, growth, retention, cost-to-serve).

Sponsor > Mentor

Mentors give advice. Sponsors advocate for you in rooms you're not in. At VP+ level, sponsorship is the single most significant predictor of advancement. Always ask: "Who is your sponsor?"

Internal Mobility Is a Tool

A lateral move to another team often comes with a grade bump that would take 2+ years through normal promotion. Don't default to "wait for promotion" — consider strategic moves.

AI-Era Framing

AI fluency is becoming table stakes; the durable premium is judgment + accountability + relationships — plus authentic, specific, verifiable self-presentation (your real work, told truthfully, not generic AI-slop). Plan toward the judgment/accountability end, not the automatable middle. The finance glass-ceiling dynamic is the worked example: AI/automation specialists in finance break through traditional ceilings by framing their work as revenue-enabling and regulatory-compliant, not just technical — the same principle (own the judgment, prove it specifically) generalizes to any sector.

---

Reference Files

Read these as needed during coaching:

• ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/user-profile.md — fill-in profile template (Part A) + a worked example (Part B); have the user complete Part A or state their situation
• ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/corporate-ladders.md — banking hierarchies, promotion mechanics, compensation bands, AI career paths
• ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/coaching-frameworks.md — all frameworks mapped to sub-skills
• ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/ai-tells-catalog.md — anti-AI-slop catalog + voice-capture protocol (consumed by writer / storytelling / positioning / human-voice-writing)
• ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/market-snapshot-2026-06.md — the single dated home for all volatile market statistics (REVIEW-BY 2027-01)

---

• references/ai-hiring-funnel.md — the machine-mediated funnel: what each automated stage scores, the integrity line, and candidate rights under GDPR Art. 22 and the EU AI Act.
• references/linkedin-mechanics.md — how LinkedIn actually surfaces profiles and content, what network composition signals, and what certifications are worth. States mechanisms, not the vendor-blog multipliers.
• scripts/career_plan.py — the live profile, action list and routine recall. Run review at the start of every career conversation.

Anti-Patterns

Anti-Pattern	Why It Fails	Correct Approach
Giving advice without reading the user profile	Generic advice wastes time and misses banking-specific dynamics like calibration cycles	Always read user-profile.md and ask clarifying questions before any recommendation
Recommending mentorship when sponsorship is needed	At VP+ level, mentors give advice but sponsors get you promoted — conflating them stalls careers	Distinguish mentorship (advice) from sponsorship (advocacy in rooms you're not in) and recommend accordingly
Defaulting to "wait for the next promotion cycle"	Lateral moves, strategic visibility, and role expansion often accelerate advancement faster than patience	Evaluate all options — lateral moves, scope expansion, cross-silo projects — not just linear promotion
Framing achievements in technical language for business audiences	Calibration committees care about revenue, risk, cost, compliance — not tech stack details	Translate every achievement into committee language: revenue enabled, risk reduced, cost saved, compliance achieved
Treating all banks as having the same culture	Investment bank VP is mid-level; retail bank VP may be senior leadership; cultures differ drastically	Reference corporate-ladders.md and ask which type of institution the user is in
Giving 2024-era job-search advice	The market changed — semantic ATS, AI interviews, the application flood, referral-first economics — pre-2025 advice misleads	Route to the refreshed children (transition §0, application-writer, online-presence); cite market-snapshot-2026-06.md for current reality
Treating the hiring funnel as human-read end to end	A candidate now passes several automated stages before any person reads anything, and the stage that eliminates most people gives no feedback	Read references/ai-hiring-funnel.md — the stages, what each scores, integrity line, and candidate rights

---

When NOT to Use This Skill

• Technical capability questions (use domain-specific skills like python-flask-developer, docker-fundamentals, etc.)
• Skill file creation or management (use research-for-skills)
• Business strategy for a webstore (use entrepreneur-webstore)
• General life coaching unrelated to career in tech/finance