How Can "Firework" Career Coaching Spark Your Transition?

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Joel Dietz, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

You’re ready for a new career, but you’re not sure what that is, and you don’t want to be back in this same place in a couple of years. The dilemma called, “What do I want to do now that I’m all grown up?” plagues plenty of mid-career professionals and even those wanting to start a new encore career in retirement. You know what you DON’T want, but not necessarily what you DO want.

Whether or not you explore your transition with the Firework™ career coaching framework, know that the best results from a career change happen when you get crystal clear about your highest priority personal values (for example “empathy,” “drive,” or “sociability”) and work values (such as “autonomy,” “flexibility,” or “a 10-minute commute.")

Values alignment is a big predictor of career satisfaction, validated (again) through peer-reviewed research from 2022 in the Journal of Career Development. The authors concluded that “Although person–environment fit interventions are useful to predict job satisfaction, this study showed that it is important that individuals’ work choices or decisions be aligned with their endorsement of intrinsic and social work values rather than extrinsic and status work values. In other words, when assessing someone’s work values, career counselors and professionals should emphasize intrinsic and social work values when identifying career opportunities that may be a good fit.”

You’re burnt out in your career, or at a minimum find it totally uninspiring. Moving to a similar job with another organization is an option, but you know it won’t help because you don’t like the actual work.

Is making a career choice that can last important to you? "Values Shmalues, you say? " Not really.

A client I’ll call “Marcos” was a Creative Director at a boutique ad agency that focuses on luxury products. He was 10 years in, burnt out, and wanted a career change. He disliked the nature of the short-term relationships inherent to agency work and was worn out by putting so much thought into promoting clients’ brands.

After deeply exploring his values, Marcos became clear that health and fitness were highest on his personal values list. He previously experienced real fulfillment as a recreational triathlete but never considered how he could express these values in his career in which he sits at a desk all day. During the coaching process, he recalled that, in his youth, he thought he might want to be a P.E teacher or a physical therapist. Through coaching to investigate and prioritize these values, Marcos realized he liked many aspects of his work: leading a team, developing abstract concepts, working against a deadline. He just wanted to find a way to work for a mission related to his health and fitness passion. But how? He didn’t want to pursue more school or certifications.

Marcos began to network with leaders of national gym chains and athletic clothing retailers and was eventually hired to lead a team of packaging designers for a brand well-known to competitive swimmers. Working in-house allowed him to build more lasting relationships with internal clients while focusing on a single brand. Marcos discovered he wasn’t looking for a total career change, only a change with better values alignment.

Conversely, Marcos may have reflected back and realized he fell into this line of work because he was good at it, but never enjoyed any part of it. In this case, the coaching process may have uncovered values like “aesthetics,” “home,” and “entrepreneurship” leading him to launch a business designing in-home gym spaces for wealthy clients.

Meet the Firework career coaching framework, a proven process for exploring and choosing your next career.

First developed in 2004 by UK-based career change coaching experts Marianne Craig and Kate Edmonds, the framework provides a structured yet flexible method to explore career options. With the Through the Firework career coaching process, you dive deep to figure out what’s most important to you in life and work to create a compelling vision for your future that’s built to last.

Career coaching with Firework guides you through 3 powerful processes:

•EXPLORE
Explore is where it begins with thought-provoking exercises to help you get crystal clear about your highest priority values. Assessments like the Strong Interest Inventory® and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator round out the insights to begin brainstorming a wide variety of career ideas. Themes and trends begin to come into focus while you undertake informal “shift projects,” activities which enable you to learn more about various career options and consider how they align with your values.

•DREAM
In the Dream phase you home in on the career choice “finalists” and create vivid pictures of what it might be like in these careers. “Shift Projects” are fieldwork experiments between coaching sessions which enable you to test these dreams against reality.

•DISCOVER
Finally, during Discover, you develop concrete plans to build a bridge from where you are to your desired career goal. Action plans take shape and you begin to work your plan with full support from your coach.

While Firework is a fantastic framework to explore career transition, it is not the only successful path. Just be sure you don’t skip the foundational work of defining and prioritizing the values which best predict your long term career satisfaction. Ultimately, if you are not making headway on your own, you may choose to work with an experienced career coach or career counselor for adults, or other professional qualified to give career guidance to people in transition.

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