Individual Career Coaching with External Coaches

Career coaching offers postdocs and those interested in doing a postdoc at KIT the opportunity to work on individual concerns and challenges in the career context with external coaches of your choice. The aim of the coaching is to help you better clarify, plan and implement your current and future academic or non-academic career and to support you in finding your own solutions.

Coaching occasions for individual career coaching can relate to topics such as

  • Clarifying and strengthening professional identity (gaining clarity about personal professional goals, decision-making, career strategy planning, visibility, career change, role clarity, self-presentation, appointment coaching)

  • Strengthening leadership skills (clarifying leadership role, leadership style and self-concept as a leader)

  • Compatibility of family and career, work-life balance, managing conflict and stress

Announcements

The registration deadline for this program expired on September 8, 2025. Information about the next call for applications will be announced on this page as soon as possible.

Please note that you must be a ▶ member of KHYS when registering for the coaching program.

Contact: ▶ Andreas Hahmann

▶ Privacy Policy

Scope of Funding

KHYS funds individual career coaching sessions by covering the costs of one-to-one coaching with a professionally trained external coach of your choice up to a maximum total amount of EUR 500 plus any applicable VAT per person receiving funding. Only fee costs for the honorarium are funded (no travelling expenses or similar).

You look for and commission your coach for individual career coaching yourself. The career coaching can be carried out from October 2025 to March 2026 after receiving the funding approval.

Postdocs and, if further places are available, doctoral researchers interested in doing a postdoc at KIT who would like to take a closer look at their further professional development. You must be a ▶ member of KHYS when registering for the coaching program.

To register for the coaching program, please complete and sign the ▶ registration form and send it to coaching∂khys.kit.edu by September 08, 2025.

Places on the program are limited. Registrations will be processed in the order in which they are received on a first come, first served basis. As this is an offer from the KHYS Postdoc Office, postdocs will be given priority in the allocation of places. Once your registration has been processed, you will receive feedback from us by e-mail in late September 2025.

If you receive a funding approval, you will independently look for and commission a coach of your choice. For your guidance, we will supply you with an overview of possible coaching providers together with the funding approval. Coaches should ideally, but do not have to, be selected from this overview. You arrange all coaching appointments individually in consultation with the coach. Usually, free initial meetings are held before the start of a coaching program to determine whether a collaboration makes sense. You will receive further information with the funding approval.

Coaching is suitable as support for specific questions ("How do I deal with a certain situation?", "What are my next steps?"), but also to accompany a process over a certain period of time, for example in situations of transition or to overcome challenges. Coaches do not present any solutions, but offer a space for targeted (self-)reflection and use various methods to support the development of your own work and solution approaches and options for action.