Communication coach: what they do and how to become one

A communication coach helps people speak, write and listen better in a particular situation, like presenting to a board, running a team meeting, handling a job interview or having a hard conversation at home. To become one you don't legally need a licence or a qualification, although training helps. What gets you clients is picking one type of person and one type of conversation, rather than "communication" in general.

That last bit is where people get stuck. First, though, what the job actually is.

What does a communication coach do?

They help someone get better at a particular kind of conversation. That might be speaking in public, presenting at work, being heard in meetings, giving feedback without starting a row, or sounding confident in interviews. Some work on the voice itself, and Wikipedia notes that the term voice coach is often used for people working on speech and communication rather than singing.

A typical session looks a lot like a rehearsal. The client brings something real, a presentation next week, a difficult chat with a member of staff, and they practise it. The coach asks questions, gives feedback, and they try it again. By the end the client should have something they can actually use on Tuesday.

Now I'll be honest about one thing. A lot of what gets called communication coaching is really teaching. Here's how you structure a presentation, here's how you use pauses, here's a framework for feedback. That's fine, teaching is a good skill, but know which one you're selling. Coaching is drawing it out of the person with questions. Teaching is showing them how. A lot of communication work is a mix of both, and your clients will want to know which they're getting.

Who pays for a communication coach?

Two groups, and they want different things.

The first is the person themselves. Someone who's just been promoted and has to present every month. Someone with a big interview coming up. Someone who freezes in meetings and is fed up of watching other people take credit for their ideas. They're paying out of their own pocket, so they want a result they can feel, quickly.

The second is an employer paying for someone in their team. I've no experience of selling company-paid coaching, so I won't pretend to know how those deals work. What I'd say is that the employer and the person being coached may not want the same thing, so be clear who your client is before you start.

Do you need qualifications to become a communication coach?

No, not legally. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are no formal requirements for becoming a life coach, and Wikipedia's page on coaching says the lack of regulation means anyone can call themselves a coach. The ICF offers voluntary certification, and some coaches find it helps people trust them, but nobody can stop you working without it.

There's one line you mustn't cross, though. Communication coaching sits right next to speech therapy, and that is regulated. In the UK, "speech and language therapist" and "speech therapist" are protected titles regulated by the HCPC. In the US, the BLS says all states require speech-language pathologists to be licensed. So if someone comes to you with a stammer, a voice problem, or difficulties after a stroke, that's not your job. Point them to a qualified therapist.

This isn't legal advice, and rules change from country to country, so check where you live. But in plain terms, you can call yourself a communication coach, you can't call yourself a speech therapist, and you shouldn't treat anything medical.

How to become a communication coach, step by step

Step 1: work out what you're actually good at

Not "communication". Something narrower. Were you the person at work who could explain the tricky stuff to the board? Did you train new staff for years? Have you spoken at events? Did you get over being terrified of public speaking yourself? Write down the situations where you've already helped people, because that's where you'll be believable.

Step 2: get some proper practice and training

You don't need it legally, but you do need to be good. Coach some people for free or cheap while you learn, and ask them to be blunt about what helped. If you do a course, do it to get better at coaching, not to get a certificate for the website. Clients care far more about whether you've helped someone like them.

Step 3: pick one person and one moment

This is the big one, so it gets its own section below.

Step 4: decide what you're selling

A package with a start and a finish works far better than "sessions". For example, "four sessions over the two weeks before your interview, with one full mock interview". People can picture that. They can't picture "communication coaching, £90 an hour".

Step 5: tell the people you've picked that you exist

Go where they already are. If it's new managers, that might be LinkedIn and industry groups. If it's best men dreading the wedding speech, it's a very different place. How to get your first coaching client with no proof covers this part properly.

How do you pick a narrower slice as a communication coach?

Here's the problem. "I help people communicate with confidence" could be anyone, and a stranger reading it has no idea if you're for them. When we scored 10,954 live coaching websites, 86% couldn't be understood by a stranger in five seconds, and vague lines like that are a big reason why.

The fix is to pick one kind of person and one kind of moment. Here are some slices, just to show you how narrow I mean:

• engineers who've just been promoted and have to present to non-technical directors
• nurses and doctors giving handovers and breaking bad news
• new managers having their first difficult conversation with someone in their team
• people whose first language isn't English and who get talked over in meetings
• best men and fathers of the bride with a speech in six weeks
• job hunters who freeze in interviews
• founders pitching to investors

Every one of those is "communication", but the person, the moment and the result are all different. And each one tells a stranger straight away whether you're for them.

When I sold double glazing, people bought windows for four reasons. Less maintenance, a warmer house, better security, or making the house look nice. My job was finding out which one was the big one for that customer, because the pitch was completely different. Communication's the same. A nervous best man and a director pitching to investors both want to speak well, but for completely different reasons, and one message won't reach both.

How to choose a coaching niche when you can do several walks through making the choice, and the list of 117 coaching niches shows what buyers in each one are after.

A made-up example: Tom picks his slice

Tom is made up. He spent 15 years as an engineer and the last five managing a team. He always got asked to present to the directors because he could explain things in plain English, and he wants to be a communication coach.

His first website line was "Helping you communicate with clarity and confidence". It says nothing. "Clarity" is all over coaching websites, and in my opinion it's a buzzword that hides you, because everyone's saying it.

So Tom asks himself who he's actually helped. The answer is engineers like him, newly promoted, who suddenly have to stand in front of directors and explain why a project is late or why it needs more money. They know their stuff and they lose the room in two minutes.

His new line is "I help newly promoted engineers present to directors without losing the room". His package is six sessions over two months, built around real presentations they've got coming up.

Will Tom turn away other people? Sometimes. But engineers who read that line will know in seconds that he's for them, and that's worth far more than being vaguely right for everyone. If you're worried you'll lose people by going narrow, a niche and an audience aren't the same thing is worth a read.

The mistake I see with niche coaches

Watch out for building your whole business around your own story. I see it all the time with niche coaches. They got over their fear of public speaking, so they assume their clients are exactly like them, with the same fears and the same reasons. Sometimes they're right, the way a broken clock is right twice a day. But often the people who'd actually pay are different from you, and they describe their problem in different words.

So talk to them. Ask five or six people in your slice what the last awkward conversation at work was, what happened, and what they wish they'd said. Use their words on your site, not coaching words. That's how you find out what your ideal coaching client really looks like, rather than assuming it's you ten years ago.

Questions coaches ask about this

The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.

Read next

• How to get your first life coaching client with no proof
• How to choose a coaching niche when you can do several
• The list of 117 life coaching niches, and what each buys