These items are completely discretionary, depending on your interests and needs:

1. Age and Gender. If you want someone your own age (or older or younger, for that matter), it's o.k. to ask for what you want. Likewise, if you believe you would feel significantly more comfortable working with one gender over the other, seek out what you want, and curb any feelings of guilt that you might be ageist or sexist. It's more important that you be comfortable enough to be open than to be politically correct. Your coach is an objective outsider, not an employee. Clients always apologize profusely when they call to ask for a male coach, but I never take it personally.

2. Industry knowledge. As much as we all like to think that our companies, roles, and industries are unique, the truth is that the majority of leadership challenges are similar across industries. Industry experience can help some people feel more comfortable with their coaches from the onset, but consider the counterargument -- the less industry experience, the less likely you are to learn that your coach is also developing your direct peer at your direct competitor.

3. Broader consulting or management experience. In my own experience, I have found that the best executive coaches have a great deal of other business experience and do not dedicate 100% of their time to working as coaches. This gives a broader perspective, but that may or may not be important in your particular situation, particularly if your development goal is of a personal nature.

When it comes to career coaching, you're swimming in some mighty strange waters these days. So strange that career coaching deserves its own spotlight in this article. If you seek coaching in anticipation of a big career move, you could experience a strange irony: your so-called career coach could do damage to your career.

Career coaching has become a popular field, along with its sidekick, resume writing. There are no barriers to entry, with the extreme variations in quality that you might expect under those circumstances.

Gone are the days when you could count on your career coach to have a graduate degree in career counseling and years of experience. You absolutely must ask for and check credentials of anyone claiming to be a career counselor.

The worst are the career coaching services that charge thousands of dollars to provide executives and aspiring executives with a "marketing director" to write your resume and tell you how to pitch yourself. There's certainly some quality to be found out there, but mostly I come across expensive junk. For example, I recently blasted two of those resumes to bits and it was a shocking but much-appreciated experience for the clients, both of whom had previously worked with me on projects. I charged a whopping $0.00, a substantially better price than the executive career coaching services had charged. These "marketing directors" had absolutely no idea what executives value, how they think, or what would make a candidate attractive to them. The resumes were full of false bravado and hot air and did not in any way reflect the fine personalities and genuine executive potential of the candidates.

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