A lot of organisations have appeared in the past few years to cater for the growing coaching industry. There are organisations, conferences and networking groups that are all making money out of coaches, but how many are really giving coaches the opportunity to develop their own skills?

As coaches, we spend our time developing other people yet it's easy to put our own development on hold.

There are also many coaches gaining qualifications from distance learning courses who are not getting the vital practice they need with a wide rnage of clients, and the support and feedback they need to develop their coaching style.

The Skills Network used to run regular, free personal and career development workshops across the UK. For the past 2 years there have been no workshops although the community and forum are still popular. We're going to resurrect The Skills Network as a live development community and use the established website and membership to launch coaching practice groups across the country.

Existing NLP and coaching practice groups tend to run meetings where a presenter comes along to talk to the group, perhaps about some new training they're offering. The people who attend the groups simply do not get the chance to practice their skills so while the talk may be interesting, it is not an opportunity to really develop and refine your coaching skills.

The Skills Network's practice groups will be a very pure format; practice only, with the possibility to work with a wide range of people, to observe, to be observed and to try out the ideas you have that you don't want to try out on your clients. The aim is for the practice meetings to be free of charge, or at least to cover venue charges if there are any.

Many coaches I speak to miss working with colleagues, and that will be an important aspect of the groups. I want the groups to have fun together and enjoy each other's company, not just work together.

Finally, as we set up more groups across the UK and perhaps the world, there will be the potential to share referrals between groups.

You could say that The Skills Network gives you all the great things about working in a company - the community, the support and the development, without any of the bad things!

My vision for this is a community of professional coaches who support, work and play together because they want to and because it's the best way for them to develop and grow and improve the quality of the work they love.

The first group will be in Warwickshire and I'm looking for people to start local groups, so please get in touch