Career coaching

Strategic career thinking for senior professionals and emerging leaders.

Career coaching at Behavioural Edge Psychology is led by Mark Fischer, a senior leader with more than a decade of experience across higher education, state government, executive search, and innovation. The service draws on direct experience of how senior roles are designed, filled, and sustained, combined with foundations in organisational psychology and MBA-level training in strategy and leadership.

The service is for adults who want a structured space to think through a career question with a coach who has worked on both sides of the table, hiring senior people, leading large teams, and partnering with executives through significant change.

Career coaching is offered as a separate service from the clinical psychology work undertaken at Behavioural Edge Psychology. Mark is not a registered psychologist. Where a client needs psychological assessment or therapy, referrals can be made to the practice’s clinical services or to another appropriately qualified practitioner.

Who this service is for

Recent clients and the kinds of questions that bring people to coaching include:

Senior leaders preparing for the next role, weighing a step out, or planning succession
Mid-career professionals considering a change in sector, role, or direction
Emerging leaders moving into their first executive or formal leadership role
Founders and scale-up leaders working through people, structure, or strategic decisions
Professionals in higher education and government working through institutional change
People returning to work after parental leave, illness, or another extended break

Career coaching is not therapy. If a career question is sitting alongside significant distress, burnout, or trauma, that is better held first by a registered psychologist. Where appropriate, coaching can run alongside therapy with both practitioners’ agreement.

What career coaching looks like

A first session covers your work history, the question or decision in front of you, and what would make this work useful for you. Subsequent sessions move into specific areas, which might include:

Clarifying what kind of work and what kind of organisation fits you at this stage of your career
Translating your capability and experience into a credible market position
Preparing for executive recruitment processes, including how senior search firms and hiring panels actually shortlist and assess
Interview, negotiation, and offer-stage preparation
Decision-making frameworks for staying, leaving, or shifting
Stakeholder mapping and influence in your current role
Leadership development for new or stretched executive responsibilities
Planning a deliberate exit, transition, or career pivot

Sessions are usually 60 minutes. Some clients work intensively over a short period; others meet less often across a longer arc. The pace is set by you.

The approach

The coaching draws on three things.

Executive search and recruitment experience gives a working understanding of how senior hiring decisions actually get made, what search firms and hiring panels are listening for, and where strong candidates lose ground in the process. Mark spent more than six years in senior recruitment and executive search.

Senior leadership experience across universities, state government, and the not-for-profit sector grounds the work in real conditions. This includes leading strategic programs with annual budgets between $9 million and $20 million, restructuring and building teams, designing university entrepreneurship programs, and supporting senior executive and ministerial offices through complex change.

An academic background in organisational psychology and an MBA shapes how the conversation engages with both the human side of careers (motivation, identity, fit, development) and the structural side (organisational design, strategy, governance).

Working with executives and senior leaders

Senior leaders carry distinctive pressures, including organisational accountability, public visibility, and roles that are difficult to separate from identity. The coaching brings direct familiarity with these conditions, including from leading strategic projects for vice chancellors’ offices and supporting senior executive teams in state government.

Common questions include sustainability in the current role, planning a step up or sideways, working through succession and exit, and rebuilding momentum after a difficult period in an executive role.

Working with mid-career professionals

Mid-career is often when career questions become both more interesting and more constrained. The coaching helps you think clearly about what you have built, what you want to do with it next, and what realistic moves look like in your sector. The executive search background brings a practical lens to what mid-career candidates are competing for and how they are assessed.

Working with founders and scale-up leaders

For founders and scale-up leaders, career coaching often overlaps with leadership development and team design. Through M.A.F Strategies, Mark works with founders on the people and leadership questions that come with growth, including building a first executive team, transitioning out of operational delivery, and deciding what role suits the founder in the next phase of the company.

Working with people returning after a break

For those returning to work after parental leave, illness, caring responsibilities, or another extended break, the coaching focuses on positioning, current market conditions, and the practical steps of re-entry. Where the return is complicated by health or psychological factors, those are best addressed alongside or before coaching, with appropriate clinical support.

Your practitioner

Career coaching is delivered by Mark Fischer, a senior leader in higher education sector, and Director of M.A.F Strategies, a boutique consulting firm working with founders and senior leaders on strategy, people, leadership, mentoring, and coaching.

Mark holds a Master of Business Administration from Macquarie Graduate School of Management, a Graduate Certificate of Management from Melbourne Business School, and a Bachelor of Psychology (Organisational Psychology) from Macquarie University. He is also certified in PRINCE2 project management.

His experience spans senior roles in higher education , state government, and leading strategic workforce programs), executive search and recruitment. Across these roles he has led multi-million-dollar programs, designed and built university entrepreneurship and startup programs, restructured teams, and partnered with senior executives through significant organisational change.

Mark is not a registered psychologist. Where coaching clients require psychological assessment or therapy, referrals are made to the practice’s clinical services or to another appropriately qualified practitioner.

Fees and rebates

A single 60-minute coaching session is $400 plus GST.

A six-session package is $2,000 plus GST, which works out to approximately $333 per session.

Career coaching fees may be tax-deductible where the coaching is directly related to your current employment or business income. The Australian Taxation Office generally treats coaching that improves your performance in your current role as deductible self-education or professional development. Coaching aimed at moving into a new field or income source is treated differently and may not qualify. Please confirm your individual position with your accountant or registered tax agent.

Where an employer funds coaching as part of professional development, please raise invoicing arrangements at intake.

Location and format

Sessions are available by secure video for clients across Australia.