Grab a cup of coffee, if you are interested in becoming a coach or wondered about the origins of Achology, then come on in and have a read…
Kain Ramsay and I co-founded Achology.com, an online membership platform focused primarily on providing live coaching training back in 2017. At this time, I was the managing director of Jellyhound, the technical team behind the project, my business partner Neil Smart brought his considerable technical expertise to the table and lead the development team. Whilst I focused primarily on the business strategy, the creation of the business, training staff, setting up the business framework, processes, legals, trademarks, support processes and logistics. Kain focused hard on completing his best selling courses, delivering a new selection of even more in depth courses as well as a world first with Gerard Egan and of course building the Facebook community to dizzy new numbers of members. This of course all before making way for a board of directors in early 2019 and a team who would of course do all of this much better than we could.
In this article, I want to set the record straight on how Achology came about, what Achology is, Achology certification, the aims of Achology (at the time of writing) and some of the common misunderstandings about the platform’s services.
You should know before reading this that I am no longer involved in the day to day running of Achology, although I do provide consultancy through Jellyhound.
With no background in coaching or modern psychology whatsoever, my first genuine question when I started researching the industry was this…
Is the coaching industry a huge scam?
Firstly, coaching is not therapy. Counselling or psychotherapy is essentially healthcare and is regulated. Coaching is not (but has many therapeutic aspects). I’m still no expert, so call me out if I’m wrong in the comments :)
There are hundreds of programs (and coaches) that charge ludicrous fees to help individuals become successful coaches, online it’s a veritable minefield of free seminars, upselling newsletters, rip off merchants and dazzling sales pitches. To the newcomer like myself, there is a daunting amount of information to wade through.
Many of these weekend / all week / all month seminars are, of course, the real deal (generally the one’s that are not telling you that you will become rich and that becoming a coach is the answer to all your problems), but requiring you to attend in person is not cost effective, it’s not conducive to long term learning goals and it’s certainly not convenient. There are also some decent, albeit expensive, international professional bodies who are more academic focused and very much set in their ways, they endorse countless courses, for a fee.
So next I began a journey of learning about accreditation, accrediting bodies, continuing professional development, codes of ethics and membership organisations.
To accredit or not to accredit
I found a lot of pseudo cults, self proclaimed divas and celebrity coaches, looking for the big bucks, targeting self helpers, seekers and promising everything, from fixing yourself to riches and easy money through seminars, courses and programs. Most of these were clear sales cycle traps and very easy to fall into, I just need to get to that next level before I can start / fix myself. At the risk of being mobbed by fans, I don’t want to fully drop Tony Robbins into this category but.. I suspect that whilst he may a talented individual, he is focused a little too much on the money / lifestyle side for my comfort zone.
On the other side of the fence are serious people, bureaucratic, accrediting organisations with strong cultures of assessment. These were interesting if not so glitzy, notably the ICF whose three letters are plastered everywhere, on every course and trainer I stumbled upon, oh and the IAC were pretty common too.
In the ICF you level up your coaching rank through hours of experience and mentorship, it is considerably expensive and can take many years to reach the top levels. The IAC are focused more on skill. Both organisations were supposedly founded by this visionary, Thomas Leonard and from what I read, I liked what he stood for.
Both of these organisations are ultimately looking to measure competence, more on this later.
Do you need to be a member of an organisation to be a coach? No.
The fundamental role of an accrediting body is to help demonstrate public trust in your ability through self and peer assessment (which in turn should help you get more clients). It is a third party that can hold you accountable for your actions, you must adhere to a code of ethics for example and can get pulled up and expelled (or worse) if you are found to do something naughty.
So for those of us without a huge bank balance, short on time but still looking to spend sensibly on training, we turn to the convenience of online courses. They can be a neutral starting point to becoming a professional practitioner.
Can I become a qualified practitioner after an online course?
Let me be blunt, yes you can, but becoming a coach straight after completing an online course is not a great idea, however the course is an excellent starting point.
Kain Ramsay achieved success, in part, by realising the importance of providing value for money in the e-learning industry.
On my first meeting Kain, he approached me asking for a new website. We spent some time together so I could get an overview of what he was doing and he had at the time achieved rather good results on the Udemy platform selling online courses. I created an initial business strategy focused on driving social media growth as a first stage with a 4 stage goal starting with ‘get 1000 users’ and ending with achieving 10,000 users and the development of some form of membership organisation. Kain of course didn’t take long to blow the social media goal away, he is a trooper in more ways than one.
Now of course when I first met Kain Ramsay, you can imagine how dubious I was of what he was teaching, it took some time to really get my head around the industry and realise that actually the subjects he covered were designed to help us in our lives. His unorthodox approach and teaching style are another reason for his phenomenal popularity and it quickly became apparent to me why modern psychology is exploding into mainstream culture. It’s relevant, it’s needed, it helps and it fills a desire to understand and better ourselves first, and help others achieve the same.
Online training is exploding and attempts to substitute for expensive class / workshop based training but it leaves a gap. If someone completes a course and then starts trying to coach or counsel individuals then they will be highly inexperienced, ineffective if not potentially harmful.
The key to achieving that competence is actual experience, building the skills covered in the online courses.
..and so the concept of the Achology was slowly born, from 6 months of long discussions, debates and team brain storming, many of which I captured on video (if this article proves popular I will perhaps release some of the Achology diaries).
So what is Achology?
My personal vision as a co-founder of Achology was to create a modern, cost efficient, digital learning environment for developing the practical and personal skills required to become a successful, trustworthy coach and develop a sustainable business. From a business perspective I believed this would tie in perfectly with Kain’s courses and it would become a starting point for a learning eco-system.
Let’s face it, we can all learn to do something to some degree but quite often we need a bit of help a) getting really good at it and b) making a business out of it.
Contrasting and complimenting my vision was Kain’s, although I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth, so let’s pinch some of his wonderful text directly.
“Achology was born as a concept in the local Dunfermline Starbucks cafe. As I sat with my good friend and business partner, Julian Young, we talked of an online academy, that wasn’t just a place for learning but was also a place where like-minded people could come together and compare notes of experience. These ‘notes of experience’ were to consist of Achology members sharing their personal highs, lows, life experiences, successes, wins, losses and failures to nurture a community-led learning environment instead of the conventional academia led teaching approach that many educational establishments embrace.“
It’s been a few years now and the website currently states that…
Achology is on a mission to achieve greater transparency when it comes to the competence of practising professionals.
achology.com
That beautifully summarises those goals the intention. There are many people involved in the vison of Achology and the platform continues to grow and evolve under it’s founders, the board of directors, it’s faculty and of course it’s managing director, Debby Spaltmann, whose many years of international corporate management and communications experience has helped build a solid foundation for this young startup.
If you ask most people, they would tell you Achology is about courses. Yes, Achology membership does offer unlimited access to those best selling Kain Ramsay psychology courses but more importantly, it provides that essential next step, the opportunity to attend and participate in live one to one and one to many training sessions, all over the world, conducted over video calls from the convenience of your mobile phone, computer or tablet.
It does of course also have an amazing community, resources, workshops, blogging/journaling, certification, newsletters and more and currently, because of it’s scalable online model, it can provide all this for an insanely low $39 a month.
What can you learn?
Below this I discuss what Achology is, the problems it is trying to solve and a bit about where it is heading, Achology recently setup some pages that talk more about some of the topics, programs and courses that can be learnt there. Whilst the links below do focus heavily on individual courses, it’s important to remember they are simply the starting point. If you are considering joining Achology, then be prepared to leave your comfort zone and meet people face to face.
CBT
Counselling
Life Coaching
Mindfulness
Neuro Linguistic Programming
Hypnotherapy
Certification, trusting a piece of paper
Online courses generally just provide a plain certificate, so how does Achology provide a certificate that means more? How can Achology help create public trust in those certificates and demonstrate the level of experience a practitioner has achieved without setting up a full scale University or coaching federation.
Well the first step was to create a verifiable certificate, that is, when you complete a course, your certificates and your membership can be verified publicly. This stage is complete and every member that completes a course can have their courses and professional membership verified at achology.com/verify; each and every certificate has a unique code at the bottom right corner that reflects your membership ID, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Continuing Professional Development
You may have heard of CPD or CPE, an acronym for Continued Professional Development / Education, it’s normally a requirement within professional fields of work. CPDStandards.com defines it as
Continuing professional development (CPD) is the intentional maintenance and development of the knowledge and skills needed to perform in a professional context.
The public, the consumer, don’t really pay much attention to this, CPD is more of a requirement from the professional body. We think that needs to change.
Hard evidence of CPD is an excellent means by which to demonstrate the commitment of a professional and thus it’s also a great way to stand out from the crowd. It isn’t easy to track and most bodies rely on self certification, that is evidence supplied by the professional to the membership body. It’s not ideal, but it’s a good start as a means to demonstrating experience and the potential for competence. If we associate your CPD level with your certification as evidence of competence, does that help us in our mission for transparency? Could that help develop public trust?
And finally, could an online coaching directory, you know, one of those websites where you find the coach you need for your specific location and needs, could it show the level of experience or CPD a practitioner has attained? Is there value in that? I think there might.
The problem with directories
As a software engineer, web developer, marketer and business owner. I bawk at the thought of online directories. They haven’t helped anyone since the 1990’s right? Well it’s true that the directories of the past are dying but a new niche, breed of directory are alive and kicking and adding value.
In the world of coaching there a few successful directories, here in the UK https://www.lifecoach-directory.org.uk/ stands out and ranks well, in the US https://www.noomii.com/ is trying very hard to become the one to rule them all. Perhaps my favourite is https://www.psychologytoday.com/ which markets itself to consumers as a magazine but is also a coaching directory. Surprise!
There is of course one issue, how do you pick a coach on these platforms? Are they the right fit for your needs and you can actually make a genuine connection with them? How do you know how much experience they have, are they competent? It’s not an easy process.
Worse still, this is not the sort of industry where you see many reviews. It’s so subjective and extremely private and personal. Reviews mean a lot less in this context.
Developing a solution
Achology and 8BitAgency are setting out to try and solve both these problems. Starting with the creation of an automated, user friendly system for tracking CPD for professional bodies (starting at home in Achology) and secondly a means to feed this information to any coaching directory that decides they want to give their listings more value and help their coaches find customers.
Achology aims to become a leading name in Coaching by supporting a revolution in the industry, it’s an attempt to make a huge improvement to the industry’s reputation, create a paradym shift in the public perception of the coaching industry. The creation of a system that is extensible and available to help any professional membership based organisation, regulated or unregulated, both internally and externally.
If you enjoyed this and would like to know more, drop me a comment below and perhaps I will follow up with the latest developments!