Coach ING: From model to tool

Coach ING, a skills model aimed at the field of training and professional development, integrates the strategic approach of coaching and the systemic and programmatic method of engineering, stimulates awareness of one's personal tools and strategies and leads people to achieve personal and professional growth. The integrated, adaptable and transversal skills model, through personal skills and technical skills gives life to a personalized and original resolution system. It is the result of an experiment started in 2014, based on a concrete userbase of "technicians", members of the Council of Engineers of Rome and Province, which led to the selection of the 16 skill sets, borrowed from skills typical of engineering and those from the strategic and relational ones of coaching [1] [2]. The selection of skills and their evaluation on the available samples were made possible thanks to the use of Data Sheets and Collection Models specifically built and submitted to the samples during the Group session in the classroom or in laboratory as one. The observation of the samples, the self-assessments, the mutual evaluations in the group work and during the effective experiments have defined not only a scale of reference levels thanks to the comparison with groups not part of the development path but also the collection and gathering of stimulus questions and answers typically related to and associated with the skills of the Coach ING model [3]. After years of experimentation with Senior technicians, a further fundamental contribution in experimenting with the method and the process of consolidating skills took place in 2017, thanks to users who would have acquired the skills to make them mature over time: the students. In this regard, in 2017 the Coach ING skills model was proposed at a first sector conference (World Engineering Forum 2017) [5], based on the possible comparison between the data collected over the years with Senior engineers and professionals in the sector and the first data collected by students of a first university laboratory (pilot project in which this new training approach was used), in which to transmit tools, scenarios and strategies useful to young future engineers close to "Entry into the workforce" (title of the related university course) [5]. A few years later, today in the fourth edition of the laboratory "Entering the workforce through the Coach NG system", the same model tested in recent years has also been introduced in a further new project called DIRECT-ING, a format created as part of the Orientation and Tutoring Project of the Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering at the University of Rome Sapienza. The intent is to make it a tool for assessing managerial potential, useful and available to a new generation in world of engineering and future technology. Thanks to online meetings organized as a Focus Groups, the direct comparison between the groups of newly enrolled or attending students, method experts and teachers, made it possible to verify and validate the "stimulus questions" associated with Coach ING model skills, collected and put together over years of application. In this way, the questionnaire is now a useful tool to bring out the potential, the attitudes and the predisposition of the students in relation to the managerial skills referred to in the model. Students are thus directed towards the training and work opportunities most suited to their characteristics because they understand better what to do and how to choose and select the best job applications. The method can also be made available to companies which have the opportunity to select motivated people by investing their time and resources in the best possible way. The entire process is therefore effective from the perspective of both the student and company looking to hire.