Coaching adds mileage to air cargo careers
Career coaching is a valuable but sometimes overlooked tool to craft professional development and performance in the workplace, say the coaching partners for the Air Cargo News Awards' Young Airfreight Professional of the Year winner.
Recruitment and retention of air cargo professionals is an ongoing industry topic but coaching and how it can nurture talent is frequently underestimated and undervalued.
Sadiya Khan, founder & managing director at SHK Solutions and Ariaen Zimmerman, who founded and leads neAira Executive Performance, are both passionate about helping people fulfil their career potential through coaching.
This extends to young people at the start of their career as well as more seasoned professionals.
In fact, the 2026 Air Cargo News Awards will mark the third time that the winner of the Young Airfreight Professional Award has been offered a personal coaching package from Khan and Zimmerman, who are experts in executive coaching within the air cargo and logistics industry.
This category was introduced to the Awards in 2024 to recognise dynamic young individuals helping to shape the future of airfreight.
Khan and Zimmerman partnered to donate four months of executive performance coaching delivered over six sessions to award winner Anna Balan, head of Awery Aviation Software's CargoBooking portal, as well as a highly discounted introductory team coaching session for Awery.
Zimmerman explains that neAira Executive Performance already had a coaching relationship with Awery and so he had previously worked with Balan.
"For us, it was a case of more or less continuing working with her."
In comparison, working with 2025's Young Airfreight winner, Ekaterina Andreeva, head of business development - cargo at Chapman Freeborn, was a new experience for both Khan and Zimmerman.
Like Balan, Andreeva also benefited from six coaching sessions, plus a prize of £500, while Chapman Freeborn was also offered a team coaching session, although this did not take place.
Value of coaching
Due to the confidential nature of coaching, Khan and Zimmerman cannot disclose the details of the coaching they have undertaken with the Young Airfreight Award winners, but Khan says this also means "you can have necessary conversations that you can't have anywhere else".
And for coaching to work, there needs to be honesty between coaches and clients. Career coaching offers a one-on-one opportunity to discuss individual career goals and challenges, and develops a bespoke career development plan or goal(s) outside the confines of standard job-linked performance objectives.
Coaching can be especially helpful when changing careers, taking on a leadership role, starting a business, or navigating other significant life changes.
Having independent coaches who work within the air cargo sector lends both an objective and informed perspective to career coaching.
Coaching is immensely useful to help people tackle the highs and lows of the air cargo market, not just situations where capacity is plentiful and rates are low and jobs are potentially at risk, but the pressure that different stakeholders put on each other to maintain and build market share, stress Khan and Zimmerman.
Constantly juggling demand, capacity, and rates is a constant pressure and "there's a high stress factor", says Zimmerman.
Another challenge can be balancing frequent international travel with an individual's personal life and, in the case of more senior positions, relocating.
Understanding the specific needs of the coachee is key, and both coaches attest to adaptability and agility being the key to a successful working relationship.
The tailored approach extends to all techniques of coaching as well as aspects of planning and delivery.
"It is very bespoke. You have to tailor and adjust your approach and be quite agile, according to the coachee in front of you," stresses Zimmerman. "That's how the best coaching happens."
Different techniques are also determined by how far along someone is in their career.
Younger coachees are generally at an earlier stage of their career, while older people are usually at a more advanced stage.
"People younger in their career, very generally speaking, are more likely to be wondering who they are and looking for what they want, and when they're further down their career, they've found their path and what they want to do and are more looking for how they can make the best of their career," reflects Zimmerman.
More than training
Khan explains that while regular workplace training is based on an agenda, coaching is individualised.
"You need to lean into the dialogue to read between the lines of what the coachee is saying.
"You've got to adapt on the fly according to what you are hearing, and what you are not hearing.
"Sometimes there is an underlying theme that the coach picks up that indicates what the fears of the person are, or the struggles and challenges they are facing.
"And sometimes that's where the gold is because the coachee is saying one thing, but you notice a pattern to those words and realise what's happening under the surface.
"So, for me, the coaching space is very much about responding in that moment according to what you are listening to, so that the person can really see what's going on in their own minds."
But, Khan adds, the job of a coach is not to provide the solutions to issues, but rather to enable the coachee to do this themselves.
"The idea isn't to solve their problem," she says. "It's about helping them to see their problem clearly, and asking those powerful questions at the right moment, so that they can find the solutions that are going to make sense to them.
"The solutions are inside them already. They just need a little bit of help to find it. And that's okay, because when you come up with the answer for yourself, you're going to own that and go away and do something about it.
Zimmerman also agrees that coaching is distinct from training. "Training is putting the necessary stuff in. Coaching is getting the best out," he stresses. "We cannot know what that best is if we don't listen and ask the right questions to our clients."
"Some clients already have a particular problem they want to address, or challenge in mind," he explains. Others are more coaching-curious, or they're not sure what they want to focus on and in this instance, it helps to get to know the client, find out how they see themselves developing and what direction they want to go in.
A coach may ask a coachee to do a personality test as a starting point to establish what issues the client recognises, how they feel about it/them, how it influences their day-to-day working life and what they want to do about it.
Though Zimmerman emphasises that individuals shouldn't be defined by these tests, he says: "From there on, we find out what they want and then we start working on that."
Echoing Khan's mindset, he adds: "That is such a bespoke process, and we provide the questions, because the best answers that people will get, they will find within themselves.
"If they find their own answer, the chances of them living that life is so much more infinite than when I tell them.
"So yes, bespoke is the only way to go for coaching in my perspective."
Recontracting for results
Clients will take the lead on determining factors of the coaching, like how many objectives there are and the pace of the sessions.
"In general, the coachee is the master of their life, and they will know best what their focus should be. So as a coach, we are there to provide accountability," says Zimmerman.
"You agree with your coach to do something, and then the coach will remind you that's what you agree to."
However, an important part of coaching progression involves reframing the focus of the sessions, something the coaches call "recontracting".
Zimmerman explains that because the coachee is not always aware of what they want to achieve straight away, there is a tendency to change the direction of the coaching partway through, sometimes multiple times.
"When you enter into a coaching process, a lot of it is about finding out what you want, and then when you start working on that, there may be a moment that you realise, okay, but to get there, there could be a need to look at something completely different than expected.
"That's called re-contracting and is quite common in the coaching process. After three sessions or so, we ask our clients whether they think we are still addressing their challenges and whether the challenges they see are still those identified at the beginning."
Fuelling development
While it is important to understand the coaching process, awareness of the potential professional development and performance benefits is of course essential to grasping the real value of coaching.
One of the core benefits of coaching is greater self-awareness. Through exploring the answers to questions and feedback from coaches, those receiving coaching can gain insight into their career strengths and weaknesses, habits, blind spots, and decision-making patterns.
This clarity on strengths and weaknesses also helps challenge assumptions about ability.
Coaching also helps coachees understand what direction they'd like to take their career in and establish a solid plan for carrying this out.
The coachee is supported in choosing and defining goals, identifying obstacles to these goals and working out how to prioritise them.
Regular reviews of measurable goals with a coach provide accountability and make it more likely the coachee will follow through on commitments and maintain momentum.
Overall, coaching can help establish a solid pathway for better long-term decision-making, improve leadership, communication and time management skills, as well as improve conflict resolution, resilience and work performance under pressure.
These benefits also apply to team coaching, alongside better collaboration and collective performance.
More recognition needed
The main message the coaching partners aim to get across is that coaching holds a huge amount of value for individuals.
Zimmerman believes there isn't enough recognition of the role that coaching in the workplace plays in the context of recruitment and retention.
For example, the cost of hiring can be 30-40% of the first year's annual salary, he points out.
"The risks that you run as a company hiring new employees are tremendous. One of the ways to reduce that risk is making sure that whoever you hire is embedded in an environment where they can get feedback and support."
Zimmerman asserts that coaching shouldn't be seen as an unusual luxury when it comes to becoming more successful in your career as there is a clear link to performance.
"I think that if you are a young, eager professional and you are ambitious, or at least you want to be, and you have a need to achieve, then making the case for coaching is relatively easy.
"There is no professional sports player out there that I know of that is successful without having at least some personal coaching and a team around them.
"Even if you're just running on a Saturday as an amateur, you'll have a coach."
"I think increasingly managers and potential leaders realise that it's quite weird if it's your job to be successful in a company and you're doing it all by yourself."
With all the value that it offers, coaching should become more common in the industry, believes Zimmerman.
"I think there's a lot of potential market out there. But I don't think there's enough understanding and appreciation of coaching."
Views from 2025's winner
For last year's young airfreight winner, Ekaterina Andreeva, head of business development at Chapman Freeborn, coaching was an experience that she had already been considering.
"I planned to have some career coaching in the next three to five years, so it was very helpful indeed."
Andreeva told Air Cargo News that she didn't have any preconceptions about what the coaching process would be like, but her overall experience has been positive.
"I did not know what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised."
Summarising the overall coaching experience, she says: "The coaches helped me assess my current professional situation and we explored potential scenarios for the future. We also reviewed some internal blockers and challenges. I think everything went well."
One challenge that did crop up concerned how to think about future career development without the certainty of knowing what will happen in the future.
"It is quite hard to make assumptions for the future, so it was probably the hardest part," Andreeva reflects.
Overall, she says she would "definitely" recommend coaching to another airfreight professional.
To find out more about coaching contact:
Sadiya Khan
Founder and Managing Director, SHK Solutions
enquiry@shksolutions.co.uk
https://www.shksolutions.co.uk
Ariaen Zimmerman
Founder and Leader, neAira Executive Performance
info@neaira.ch
https://www.neaira.ch/
