← Lara Chen · Research & Insight Partner

Research brief · Executive coaching

Beyond Credentials

How can an experienced executive coach become harder to replace?

A short investigation into what is becoming common — and what may be harder to reproduce.

Lara Chen · Research & Insight Partner

After reviewing more than 100 coaches' profiles and websites, I noticed something more interesting than another market trend.

Experience was common. What differed was the shape given to it.

I examined how coaches presented their experience, clients, credentials, the problems they solve, methods, research and ideas. I then looked more closely at a smaller group of executive-coaching practices.

Years of experience, formal credentials and broad leadership expertise appeared repeatedly. What varied more was whether those years had become something another person could clearly understand and remember.

In one practice, experience had become a focus on high-stakes decisions. In another, it had become a specific founder transition. In another, the coach connected the practice to research around a particular leadership problem. Elsewhere, extensive experience remained visible mainly as biography, credentials, broad leadership language or a collection of services.

The difference was not simply how much experience the coaches had. It was whether that experience had been converted into a recognizable problem, point of view, method, research territory or body of ideas.

This was an exploratory market review, not a representative industry survey. I did not use it to rank individual coaches or to claim that one positioning approach causes greater commercial success.

But the pattern matters because of what is happening around it.

Executive coaching is growing and becoming more professionalized. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study reports 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide and $5.34 billion in annual revenue.

• 73% say clients and organizations increasingly expect credentials.
• 43% earned another qualification in the previous year; 38% planned another within one to three years.
• 60% also provide training, 57% consulting and 55% facilitation.
• 87% use video for coaching.

Credentials matter. Experience matters. But several visible signals of a professional coaching practice are widespread or becoming more common.

When credibility becomes more common, what becomes harder to reproduce?

The practice review suggests a useful test. Some differences can be adopted relatively quickly by another competent coach. Others depend on years of accumulated experience, evidence, relationships or repeated work inside a particular problem.

This does not mean that harder-to-reproduce assets automatically create a stronger business. It simply asks a more demanding question than “What makes me different?”

Would another good coach need to change their website — or change their career — to reproduce what makes you different?

There is another problem. Even valuable experience can remain hidden.

Twenty years can contain hundreds of client conversations, mistakes, exceptions, patterns and judgments. Yet all of that knowledge can be compressed into a line that says only “20+ years of experience.”

I think of this as the Experience Conversion Gap: the gap between everything an expert has learned and how much of it has become clear, visible and useful.

Experience does not automatically explain itself. It has to be examined. Repeated situations become patterns. Patterns create questions. Questions can be investigated. Investigation can produce an insight, method, diagnostic, body of research or point of view that other people can actually use.

But looking backward is not enough. The problems executives face are changing too.

Deloitte's 2026 Human Capital Trends research found that 85% of leaders consider adaptability at today's required speed critical, but only 7% say they are leading in helping their workforce continuously grow and adapt. McKinsey found a related gap: 70% of respondents say they personally feel ready to adopt and use AI, while only 27% of leaders believe their organizations are ready to make the shifts required for an agentic future.

The point is not that AI is replacing coaching. It is that the problems leaders need help with are changing. That means accumulated experience becomes more useful when it is connected to what is becoming important now.

Your next valuable idea may not come from adding another credential, tool or service. It may come from connecting something you have already learned with something becoming important now.

Five questions can begin that investigation:

1. What problem have I seen repeatedly?
2. What do people commonly misunderstand about it?
3. What pattern have I seen across different clients?
4. What have those cases taught me to see or do differently?
5. Who has an important reason to care about what I learned — especially now?

The goal is not to invent something nobody else can say. It is to discover what you understand unusually well, investigate it properly, and connect it to a problem that matters.

What have years of experience taught you that your market still can't see — and what is changing now that makes it matter?

Have a question you've wanted to investigate properly?
Tell me what it is.