The Coaching Practice Gap: The Part of Coach Training Nobody Provides

There's a moment almost every new coach hits, and almost nobody warns them about.

You've finished your training. You paid for it properly: a serious coaching qualification costs anywhere from £4,000 to £17,000, and you probably did it alongside a full-time job. You learned the competencies, practised in class, passed the assessments. You are, by any reasonable definition, trained.

Then you look at the credentialing requirements. The ICF's entry credential asks for 100 hours of coaching experience. The professional level asks for 500. And the path from trained to credentialed is, for most coaches, entirely theirs to figure out.

One coach described it exactly this way in a conversation with us: the training programmes give you the classroom hours, and then there's really no direction on how you get from there to a hundred.

That's the practice gap. The training is paid for. The practice isn't provided.

Why the gap exists

Coach training programmes are good at what they charge for: teaching frameworks, running supervised practice in class, preparing you for assessment. But the hundreds of hours between graduation and credential sit outside their business model. Practice hours require other people, over months, on an ongoing basis. No curriculum can hand you that.

So each new coach improvises. They coach classmates until the cohort drifts apart. They post in Facebook groups and get ghosted. They offer free sessions to strangers and discover that unpaid one-way coaching is capped anyway (the ICF only counts 25 pro bono hours toward the first credential). Some pay again, for matching services or accumulating mentor-coaching packages, on top of everything the training already cost.

Meanwhile the profession keeps growing: tens of thousands of new coaches start training every year, and every single one of them will hit this same gap.

Why it matters more than it looks

The practice gap doesn't just slow coaches down. It filters the wrong people out.

Getting through it on the improvised routes takes marketing confidence, spare money, and a thick skin for being ignored. None of those are coaching skills. A brilliant, sensitive coach who dreads self-promotion can stall at 30 hours indefinitely, while a mediocre one with a bigger network sails through. The gap selects for hustle, not craft.

And the coaches most likely to stall are often the ones the profession most needs: career changers who bet on becoming good guides and helpers, who did the training out of conviction, and who have nothing left over for a second gauntlet.

What closing the gap looks like

The raw material was always there. At any moment there are thousands of coaches who all need the same thing: a partner to practise with, reciprocally, for real. They just had no way to find each other beyond luck and comment threads.

That's the problem Robin exists to solve. Robin is a free practice-partner platform: a private directory of coaches from different programmes and countries, with messaging, scheduling, video calls, and an hours logbook built in. Reciprocal peer practice also happens to count toward ICF paid-hour requirements (the ICF's definition of payment includes barter, naming peer-to-peer coaching as its example), which means the hours you exchange are the hours you need.

The practice gap should not be the thing that stops good coaches. Join Robin free and close yours.