Advanced Certificate in Mentor Coaching

This module establishes the foundation for the entire programme. Before you can mentor coaches, you need to understand what mentor coaching is, what it is not, and what it asks of you as a practitioner.

• ICF definition and framework: Explore what the ICF means by mentor coaching.
• Key distinctions: Understand the differences between mentor coaching, coaching supervision, coaching, and skills training, and why those distinctions matter in practice.
• The six ICF Mentor Coaching Competencies: Get an overview of the full competency framework that anchors this programme.
• The identity shift to mentor coach: Examine what it means to hold a developmental stance rather than an expert one, and how your own coaching background will shape what you notice.

Ethics in mentor coaching is present in every aspect of the work: how you hold the relationship, how you handle recordings and data, how you manage boundaries, and how you respond when what you observe raises professional or legal concerns.

• Role clarity and professional boundaries: Understand the distinctions between mentor coaching, supervision, and coaching, and when and how to refer when a client’s needs fall outside your scope.
• Data privacy and legal responsibilities: Learn what the ICF Code of Ethics requires around consent, recording, and data retention, and how local data protection regulations apply to your practice.
• Cultural sensitivity and bias in feedback: Explore how identity and cultural context shape both sides of the mentor coaching relationship, and develop strategies for giving effective feedback.

This section covers how to establish the mentor coaching engagement and then manage the developmental process with the same level of care and partnership throughout.

• What a mentor coaching agreement should contain: Cover the full scope of the engagement.
• Credential-level contracting: Learn what it means to contract specifically for ACC, PCC, or MCC level work.
• Co-creating the developmental plan: Partner with your mentee to build a plan that reflects their goals and growth areas, not your framework for what development should look like.
• Managing the process across the engagement: Apply adult learning principles to how you hold the developmental relationship, check in on what is working, and adjust when the plan stops serving the mentee.

These three modules form the technical core of the programme. They build progressively: your ability to listen with precision directly shapes the quality of your documentation, and both determine how useful and credible your feedback actually is.

• Critical listening: Develop an ear for competency demonstration. Examine how your own coaching experience and training shape what you notice and what you may filter out, and use the ACC BARS, PCC Markers, and MCC BARS as concrete anchors for observation.
• Formative appraisal documentation: Learn to complete the Session Observation Form and Competency Review Form in a way that makes your observations useful across a full engagement. 
• Facilitating skill development: Move from observation and documentation into developmental conversation that your mentee will engage in. Learn to support the mentee in integrating new learning within their own coaching style.

The final module of the programme focuses on group mentor coaching and how to apply everything you have built across the programme in a multi-person environment. 

• Structure and facilitation: Understand how group sessions differ from individual work, how to set up live coaching demonstrations safely, and how to structure the observation and feedback process for the whole group.
• Managing group dynamics: Learn to handle dominant participants, disengaged learners, and energy within the group, and to draw in quieter voices without putting anyone on the spot.
• Simulated group practicum: Practice facilitating a live group mentor coaching segment with peer feedback, so you finish the programme ready to step into group work.