Nishika begon haar carrière als consultant voor Fortune 500 en Silicon Valley bedrijven. Vier jaar geleden startte ze haar eigen modemerk dE ROSAIRO met vestigingen in San Francisco en New York. Sinds dit jaar is ze gestart met een nieuw avontuur, Experiential Insight, waarbij ze innovatie brengt op het gebied van student ontwikkeling door coaching van het voetstuk te halen en toegankelijk te maken voor studenten en net-afgestudeerden.
Question: Why do students need executive coaching? Why is this so important? What’s missing in their current education path?
Answer: This is a great question, and one that gets me so passionate. Basically, our experience working with global corporates, startups and universities, is telling us one key thing: our university students are not prepared for the future. Research is telling us that the most important skills defining an individual's success at a micro level, and ultimately a company's success at a macro level, are the interpersonal skills that are often neglected. The ability to understand ourselves and the ability to relate to others are often neglected in place of the pursuit of knowledge. However, as artificial intelligence and automation come into play, these abilities will soon become the greatest differentiator between success or failure. If you look around you, the game changing leaders around us have mastered these skills, while others continue to struggle to be recognized and propel forward. This is a gap that is hindering our student’s abilities to stand out as the individualized, creative, emotionally intelligent, and authentic leaders that we need to see in the world today. In order to equip students with these critical skills, we need to do something drastically different. This is why we are taking executive coaching (the most effective and proven self development tool) off its pedestal and why we are disrupting the student development space by making it accessible to university students in a global, virtual and ridiculously affordable way. Our vision is to create real leaders for our future.
Question: How is executive coaching different to career coaching or services that a career center at a university would provide?
Answer: Career centers while so helpful tend to have transactional relationships with students. For example, a student has an interview and really needs to practice their interviewing skills, so they go to their career center. Or a student needs to find a job, and has no idea where to begin, so they go to their career center. Additionally, career coaching focuses on a student landing their first job out of college, where else executive coaching prepares a student for their entire career and life. What a student learns through executive coaching are critical skills that simply cannot be unlearned.
Question: What does your business model look like? How do you earn money and make it affordable for students and recent graduates at the same time?
Answer: What makes executive coaching a premium service is the price tag that goes with it. In the US, coaches are paid $350+ an hour, or about $30K+ for a 6 month retainer. No student can afford that. And frankly, most companies’ can’t even afford that beyond their executive teams. So what we have done is created a model based on a few key criteria. First we asked the question of how students and recent graduates learn best, and then we asked the questions of how we can connect students to one another, keep overheads low, and optimize the digital age we live in. What we learned was that students tend to learn best in intimate group settings where they can discover themselves and also learn from the experiences of others. The idea of augmented learning is key for them to really motivate and stretch themselves. We also realized that a real benefit from tapping into a global base of students is the community that we get to create where students can stay connected to each. So we’ve augmented technology to build our 6-6-6 model, which is 6 students 6 sessions and 6 weeks, to be able to provide an experience in our Experiential Insight App where all the group chats, the student to student connections, and the voice activated real-time coaching happens. So instead of paying executive coaching rates, our students pay $300 for 6 weeks of virtual executive coaching which is ridiculously affordable.
Question: And what does it take to work at the Apples and Tesla’s of the world? Or to be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What advice can you give away?
Answer: I’ve had a career where I’ve been lucky enough to work for Apple, Deloitte Consulting, Salesforce, Chevron, Levi, and many other Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley companies, in human resource and executive coaching type roles. So I know first hand what these companies look for, and it comes down to ‘what else do you bring to the table’? Let’s face it, everybody has a degree nowadays, and there’s nothing cool about that. These companies want to know who you are as a person, how you connect to other humans, if you have a creative mindset, what impact you will create, how emotionally intelligent you are, and so on. These are the skills that universities just don’t teach, and that companies are looking for. So my advice to any student out there is: get smart about how you as a student put your best foot forward. You only have one life to live so why not make it an awesome one!
More information: www.experientialinsight.com