In this episode of Growth Dialogues, Ram Gopalan, Co-Founder of Simply.Coach, speaks with Jaya Bhateja, Master Certified Coach and Founder of Abhyudaya Global Coach Academy, about the upcoming changes to ICF's credentialing process. They cover what the changes mean for aspiring coaches, mentor coaches and the schools that train them.

Jaya founded Abhyudaya Global Coach Academy in 2015 and has spent more than 20 years in leadership and coaching, including as a strategy leader at Accenture. An ICF Master Certified Coach since 2019, she trains and mentors coaches towards ACC, PCC, MCC and ACTC credentials, and has coached CXOs and senior executives at global organisations.

She has served on the ICF Global Board and judged the ICF Prism Awards three times. She received the ICF India Coaching Excellence Guru Award in 2023 and the ICF Young Leader Award in 2019. She lives in India, though she'll tell you her work belongs to the world.

In this conversation, Jaya explains why ICF is moving from an evaluative model to a developmental one. From 1 April 2027, coaches will no longer submit a final recording for assessment. Instead, they'll go through formative assessments during their training. Their mentor will be accountable for their growth, not just for giving feedback, and will decide whether they're ready for their credential. Jaya walks through the new mentor credential, which requires 60 hours of education, ICF's BARS training and experience, and explains why it puts far more responsibility on mentors and on coach training schools. She's also candid about the harder side of the change: rising costs for schools, price competition from much cheaper programmes, and why corporate buyers increasingly ask for PCC coaches.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why ICF is replacing the final recording submission with ongoing formative assessments
• How the mentor's role shifts from offering feedback to deciding credential readiness
• What it takes to earn ICF's new mentor credential, and why a coach's trainer can no longer be their mentor
• Why coach training schools now carry full responsibility for training, mentoring and assessment
• Why ICF-accredited programmes must be at least 50% synchronous, and where recorded courses still fit
• How new credentials for mentors, coach educators and supervisors are opening career paths beyond one-to-one coaching

Whether you're preparing for your first ICF credential, working as a mentor coach or running a coach training programme, this conversation gives you a practitioner's view of what's changing in ICF credentialing and how to get ready for it.

In this episode of Growth Dialogues, Ram Gopalan, Co-Founder of Simply.Coach, speaks with Pradeep Sarin, coach, consultant, and Founder of New Ver ME, an organization that provides individuals equal, transparent, and access to high quality coaches. They talk about what it actually takes to make coaching affordable and accessible, not as a tagline, but as a working business model.

Pradeep's path into coaching started as a reluctant client. Years into a banking career, he resisted being assigned a coach, until six months of persistence from her changed how he saw the profession entirely. He later certified as a coach in 2017 with one goal: reach people who'd never normally get access to one because they couldn't afford it, or didn't know it existed. That mission became New Ver ME, now in its fifth year, built on a "pay what you can" model and a break-even philosophy rather than a profit one. What started with individual clients has grown into full B2B coaching engagements for mid-level managers and executives across industries — audiences the coaching industry has largely ignored.

This conversation doesn't stay comfortable. Pradeep is candid about the tension between mission and money, the limits of measuring coaching's ROI, and why he believes most coaches gravitate toward the CXO market for the wrong reasons.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How a resistant coaching client became a coach with a mission to make it accessible
• Why New Ver ME operates on a "pay what you can" and break-even model, and how that's sustained for five years without raising prices
• How Pradeep measures coaching impact without a clean ROI number
• Why coaches stay engaged in the mission even without premium pay
• How coaching-based training is reaching audiences that traditional coaching has never touched
• Pradeep's advice to newly certified coaches on finding their "why" before their niche

If you've ever wondered whether coaching can genuinely scale beyond the boardroom without losing what makes it work, this episode makes the case... with the unfiltered detail to back it up.

In this episode of Growth Dialogues, Ram Gopalan, Co-Founder of Simply.Coach, speaks with Alexandra Lamb, Founder of BOLDLY, the global executive coaching marketplace now part of Bendelta Group, about where AI genuinely helps coaching and where it shouldn't go near it.

Alexandra founded BOLDLY in Singapore in 2017 after seven years at Korn Ferry in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where she managed client relationships and built talent strategy programs. She has since grown BOLDLY into a marketplace of 900+ vetted coaches spanning all major global markets and languages, and the business is now part of Bendelta Group. Alexandra holds a Master of Science in Coaching Psychology from the University of Sydney and an Executive Masters in Coaching, Consulting and Change from INSEAD, and writes and speaks widely on where AI belongs, and doesn't belong, in the coaching relationship. She still coaches leaders herself, and believes the work only holds up when a human stays in the room.

In this conversation, she makes the case for an "augmented" model; AI handling the logistics and always-on support between sessions, while the human coach holds the parts of coaching that can't be automated: silence, empathy, and reading what isn't said. She's clear about where she draws the line, particularly on AI acting as the coach itself rather than supporting one, and she gets into the harder questions organisations are still working through: cost versus efficacy, governance and consistency at scale, data privacy, and how cultural context shapes whether an AI coach lands well or falls flat.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why low-hanging fruit like scheduling and matching should be automated first, before AI ever touches the coaching conversation itself
• Why Alexandra believes a human coach should never become just "the delivery vessel" for an AI's questions
• Why people often disclose more to an AI coach than a human one, and what that means for the coaching relationship
• How governance and consistency are pushing some organizations toward AI coaching as fast as cost is
• Why cultural context and power distance change how an AI coach is experienced across different markets
• How Alexandra thinks about building AI-augmented coaching operating models at scale

Whether you're a coach figuring out where AI fits into your practice, or an HR leader evaluating an AI coaching rollout, this conversation offers a grounded, non-hyped view of where the technology helps and where it doesn't.