Coach Product Update: February 2026
Moving toward an ongoing system of career guidance
Over the past several months, we have been steadily strengthening Coach's foundation. We improved transparency and reliability for learners and built out the enterprise-readiness features institutions need to deploy Coach responsibly at scale.
Now we're moving into the next phase: preparing Coach to support sustained engagement, momentum, and follow-through over time.
These changes reflect a core reality institutions see every day. Effective career guidance is not a single interaction. It's ongoing, goal-oriented, and shaped by what happens between advising touchpoints as much as during them.
Making progress visible
In our research with job seekers, we consistently heard a desire for accountability, continuity across sessions, and a sense that their work was building toward something. To address this, Coach now includes clearer signals that make progress visible and encourage learners to return.
Learners can see activity streaks displayed right in the interface and earn badges when they meaningfully engage with Coach. This happens not just by logging in, but through substantive back-and-forth conversations. A new Progress page lets learners track their streak status, set their preferred engagement cadence (daily, weekly, etc.), and see which badges they've earned along the way.
For institutions, this helps normalize ongoing engagement across large learner populations without adding operational burden for staff.
Learners can now track their progress
Building the infrastructure for proactive learner support
Career guidance shouldn't rely on learners remembering to come back on their own. When we asked job seekers what was missing from their experience with Coach, a consistent theme emerged: they wanted a partner, not just an information source. They wanted someone who would follow up, check in, and help them stay on track. We've built proactive follow-up capabilities into Coach that allow it to continue supporting learners beyond the moment a session ends.
These capabilities include personalized follow-ups after meaningful interactions, complete with reminders, resources, or next steps based on what the learner just worked on.
Learners opt in and manage their own communication preferences. They can choose between email and SMS, see a clear list of supported countries for text messaging, and opt out at any time. We've designed this to feel like ongoing collaboration with Coach, not interruption.
While these proactive features are still undergoing final testing, the underlying infrastructure is in place. This work lays the groundwork for more continuous support at scale.
Connecting learner goals to structured next steps
Learners can now set career goals directly from the Coach homepage. Those goals actively shape which activities Coach surfaces, giving learners a clearer, more structured path forward rather than a generic menu of options. This was another clear finding from our research: learners appreciated the range of activities available, but wanted Coach to help them "connect the dots" and build momentum between sessions rather than presenting options without direction.
Learners can now set goals and receive relevant activity recommendations
Additionally, onboarding has been refined with new questions designed to improve personalization from day one.
Improving what happens inside activities
Engagement features matter, but so does what learners experience when they actually use Coach. Our Coaching and Learning Expert has been redesigning a subset of Coach activities to shift learners from passively receiving information toward actively practicing skills.
The changes focus on how Coach guides learners through a task. Rather than defaulting to Q&A-style information delivery, redesigned activities break complex tasks into manageable steps, walk learners through hands-on exercises, and gradually transfer responsibility from Coach to the learner. These activities now close with prompts that encourage learners to reflect on what they've learned and how they'd apply it.
Early results are promising: in redesigned activities, the share of learners engaging in hands-on practice rather than just asking Coach for answers rose from 18% to 30%.
Coming next
In the coming months, we'll begin rolling out the next phase of these capabilities:
Expanded proactive outreach channels, including WhatsApp, allowing Coach to follow up with learners in ways that fit their preferences and routines.
Further enhancements to goal setting and recommendations, improving how Coach adapts guidance as learners progress and change direction.
A redesigned homepage that brings general chat and guided activities into a more unified starting point, making it easier for learners to know where to begin and how to continue.
Onboarding improvements and educational emails designed to help learners get value from Coach more quickly, reducing the need for staff intervention.
Better visibility for advisors and admins, including clearer insight into learner engagement and assigned activities, supporting more effective human follow-up where it matters most.
We're excited about this next stage of Coach's evolution and what it enables for institutions supporting learners at scale. If you'd like to see these updates in action or discuss how Coach could support your learners, we'd be glad to connect.
