Health Coach Jobs: A Guide

by Jerald Dyson
health coach jobs

Health Coach Jobs: Health coaching is playing an important part in the future of medicine and healthcare. Health coaching has grown to be a $7 billion industry.

Still, because it’s a relatively new industry, people frequently inquire about the prospects for a health coach’s career. Continue reading to get answers to your concerns and discover more about the career options for health coaches.

What’s A Health Coach?

Before heading on the career options and questions related to Health coach jobs, let’s first understand what a health coach is and what exactly do they do?

Health coaches counsel, motivate and work with people to help them accomplish their health and fitness goals. Health coaches can assist you in adopting a healthier lifestyle or attaining ambitious exercise goals. Nutrition and exercise are two of their most important strategies.

When you employ a health coach, they may begin by asking questions about your background and habits. They determine what your objectives are and why you may not be achieving them. They also want to know what you’ve done in the past and how things came out. Even though the two jobs require different credentials, health coaches frequently take on the position of personal trainer.

health coach jobs

The ACE Health Coach Certification course can help you become a health coach. Reviewing the course materials, passing the final exam, and obtaining a license are all part of this process.

When it comes to being a health coach, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Did you know, for example, that they earn an average of $19.18 per hour? That works up to $39,884 per year!

Between 2018 and 2028, the career is predicted to rise by 11%, resulting in 14,100 job openings across the United States.

What Does A Health Coach Do?

A health coach is a professional health educator who helps people change their lifestyles and behaviors. They work with clients to help them be the best versions of themselves by making modifications to their diet and lifestyle.

Health Coach Responsibilities

In the preparation and performance of worksite health improvement programs, they consult with employer groups.

Encourage staff to participate in yoga and strength training activities over lunch, as well as cooking demonstrations and office nutrition trivia.

Develop and lead health education programs in areas such as ergonomics, stress management, weight management, CPR, and first aid.

Create and facilitate PowerPoint presentations in various venues to facilitate health education workshops for various populations.

Individuals can be helped with diabetes management, diet, stress management, and smoke cessation by promoting, educating, and assisting them.

Maintain and regulate all hippa-related patient documents using an electronic medical record (EMR).

Consult with physicians on a frequent basis on the weight and hypertension control methods taken by patients.

Comply with HIPAA requirements and firm confidentiality policies in all aspects of their job.

Comply with all HIPAA and ADA laws on the protection of health information and the prevention of discrimination.

To aid in the reduction of health risks, provide and support resources to the Medicare disease management population.

What Are The Potential Job Opportunities For Health Coaches?

Health coach jobs: Working in a growing field like health coaching offers you a lot of options in terms of designing a career that takes advantage of your previous experience, develops your unique abilities, and suits your lifestyle.

There are more options for developing a rewarding and meaningful career as a health coach than we can cover here, so let’s focus on three of the most popular paths: full-time employment, collaboration with clinicians, and private practice.

Full-Time Employment

Health Coaches Work In A Range Of Situations, Including:

Private clinics, such as the California Center for Functional Medicine (CCFM)

Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic are two examples of institutional clinics.

Larger Corporations Have Wellness Initiatives.

Companies that provide primary care, such as Iora Health, as well as health and wellness companies, such as health coaching firms.

health coach jobs

They work for schools that teach health coaching or for universities with health coaching programs. Corporations are increasingly using them. Nearly 46% of firms have wellness programs, with many of them employing health coaches.

There are a handful of full-time options available. At the same time, it’s vital to remember that the job market for health coaches is continually developing, whether you graduate from the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program or another program. As a result, many coaches wind up in a different line of work: private practice.

Health Coach Jobs: Private Practice 

Many coaches aspire to be their own bosses, setting their own hours and focusing on a certain clientele. This path is ideal for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit or prior business management expertise. Any health coach should strive for this. Building a successful company may be a difficult and sometimes humiliating task. 

But, As With Other Triumphs In Life, Your Hard Effort Pays Off.

Many health coaches take a career path that combines some combination of private practice and employment or collaboration with a clinic as they work their way up to a complete private practice. A health coach, for example, might work with private clients as well as collaborate with a Functional Medicine practitioner. That hybrid career path is more typical of what a beginner or even experienced health coach might encounter. That’s why it’s critical for a health coach training program to include professional growth advice as well as ideas on how to establish a practice and interact with other professionals.

Partnering With Clinics

Health coach jobs: In a variety of ways, health coaches and clinicians collaborate (and with different clinicians, it works differently). In some circumstances, the patient’s initial intake is handled by the health coach. The patient gets to know the health coach, and the health coach gets to know the patient. The clinical workup and lab tests would be handled by the clinician, with the health coach present or not.

The health coach would then manage follow-ups, assist with the implementation of the treatment plan, and assist the client with the diet, lifestyle, and behavior changes that the physician prescribed. The health coach also gets access to all of the patient’s data, ensuring that care remains consistent.

The clinicians and the health coach would contact on a regular basis as well. At CCFM, they use an internal chat platform to discuss patients in a confidential manner. This allows the health coaches and all of the practitioners at CCFM to work closely together.

Health Coach Jobs: Can Health Coaches Work With Private And Public Entities?

It’s an exciting moment to be in this field right now. There are several options to collaborate with major commercial enterprises as well as governmental institutions such as municipal departments.

At CCFM, they completed a pilot program with the Berkeley Fire Department to improve the health of their new recruits, reduce injuries, and reduce burnout. They shed around 30 or 40 pounds as a group of about ten people, and they were really pleased with the results.

health coach jobs

Management consultants that work with major, worldwide organizations can also collaborate with health coaches. As part of their wellness programs, several large-scale businesses are looking to implement health coaching-based interventions among their employees. Corporate wellness, in and of itself, is predicted to expand to a $13 billion market by 2023, implying that these prospects will persist.

Can You Make Your Own Career As A Health Coach?

Health coach jobs: You have the freedom to design your own professional path, including combining health coaching with other healthcare disciplines such as physical therapy or nutrition. Patients with chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and depression benefit from health coaching. A number of health professionals benefit from health coach training as well. Doctors that have received health coaching training will have better outcomes with their patients. Because of the support role that nurse practitioners and physician assistants frequently play in addition to their roles as clinicians in their own right, they might likely benefit from health coaching.

It’s also important for those of you who work with patients on behavior change on a regular basis, such as physical therapists and personal trainers, to master health coaching and core coaching skills. As you’ve discovered, you’re dealing with some of the same ambivalence issues that a health coach or nutritionist deals with: people at different phases of transformation or people who can’t find the drive they need to stick with their program.

You’ll be much more effective as a physical therapist, trainer, or another healthcare provider if you study and implement health coaching into your approach.

The Benefits Of A Career In Health Coaching

There are a few less obvious but substantial benefits to adopting a health coaching career, aside from the obvious gratification of making a difference in people’s lives and earning a job doing something you love.

Flexibility In Your Lifestyle

Health coach jobs: Even in today’s hyper-connected, digital world, there are few jobs that allow you to make a decent livelihood “beyond the cubicle.” As a health coach, you have the flexibility to design a profession that offers variety and allows you to work from home for part or all of the time. You have the option of working digitally, in person, or a combination of the two. You can set your own hours to some extent or opt for the rigidity of a full-time job if that suits your life and personality better. You can establish several streams of income by mixing and matching clients and collaborations of various types, giving you more freedom, control, and satisfaction in your work.

Highly Portable Skills

As a health coach, you’ll master essential coaching skills that can be used to more than just modify food, exercise, and health-related habits. The ADAPT Health Coach Training Program’s behavior coaching techniques are applicable in any setting with any type of behavior modification. This gives you even more freedom in deciding on a career path. Health coaches are frequently gym owners or chiropractors. In addition to health coaches, they could be life coaches or employee performance coaches. And, if you ever decide to leave the health field, the abilities you’ve learned will help you flourish in a wide range of situations, making you a standout prospect for any future profession you seek.

Positive Impact

Health coach jobs: When asked what shocked them the most about what they learned in their health coach training course, many of the students said they didn’t know the tremendous impact it would have on their personal development and relationships with their spouses, kids, and colleagues.

health coach jobs

One of the most appealing aspects of being a health coach is that the coaching skill set spans a wide range of topics and fills a void in our healthcare system. To put it another way, Coaches can work with clients on a variety of health issues, with practitioners to help patients modify their habits, and with an increasing number of corporations that are concerned about their employees’ health and healthcare expenditures.

How can you make the most of these changes? Choose a coach training program that provides professional growth in addition to essential coaching skills.

Health Coach Jobs: The Future For Full-Time Health Coaches

In the future, there will be an increasing number of full-time opportunities for health coaches.

Organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mayo Clinic, and Cleveland Clinic are either using or expressing a need for health coaches. In addition, primary care organizations such as Iora Health are employing health coaches to help patients reverse type 2 diabetes. The National Board of Medical Examiners has emphasized that health coaching will be a critical component of the solution. A rising number of private clinics, both in conventional medicine and integrative and functional medicine, have seen the light and are recruiting more health coaches.

Conclusion

Health coach jobs: It’s likely that when you ponder your next career move, you don’t know exactly what your future as a health coach will entail, but you do know how you want it to feel.

Focusing on your skills and values and formulating how they may propel your future is helpful and a basic element of health coaching as you begin to take the courageous moves toward a new chapter.

We hope this guide covered all your basics and answered all the questions that you were wondering in your head while looking for health coach jobs. 

Related Articles

Leave a Comment