Yorkshire office just the job for career coach Corinne

Ms Mills, managing director of Personal Career Management, said Leeds’s vibrant financial services, insurance and public sectors made it a natural choice.

Leeds will be the group’s first office in the north of England and follows branch openings in London and Birmingham.

Ms Mills, the author of the number one best selling CV book You’re Hired! How to Write a Brilliant CV, said she expects to see a lot of clients from the public services sector.

“Moving from the public sector to the private is a big challenge for people,” she said. “The public sector used to be a job for life – there was stability. Now they are being made redundant and there are all these people on the market thinking ‘there are no jobs for me’.

“It’s not easy to step into a private sector job. It’s a very different mode of operation. In a commercial organisation the bottom line is profit. If it doesn’t make a profit none of us will be here.”

Personal Career Management works with a number of major organisations including NHS trusts, councils, Government departments and financial services firms that are making staff redundant.

The company offers a wide range of services from writing up CVs and creating Linked In profiles to one-to-one coaching and interview training.

The company claims that 82 per cent of its clients get “a job they really want”, 11 per cent start their own business and 98 per cent would recommend Personal Career Management to someone else.

Around 60 per cent of the business comes from individuals who are looking for a change or who have lost their jobs and the other 40 per cent comes from companies that are offering employees career coaching as part of their redundancy package. The company offers a free telephone consultation that lasts an hour.

“People don’t know how to sell themselves. It takes them out of their comfort zone and they associate it with boasting. We can teach them how to do it,” Ms Mills added.

At the start of the coaching process, Ms Mills and her team carry out a career analysis, working out what people are good at. Prices range from £500 for a smaller programme to £4,000 for 14 hours of coaching.

“We deconstruct it for them. People remind themselves that actually they were really good at this,” she said.