Bearings Advisory
When careers change direction, we help you find yours.
Bearings Advisory helps senior professionals navigate career change with clear advice, structured tools and experienced coaching, built around your situation.
Founded by Colin Hamilton, former global HR executive and Chief People Officer, IECL-qualified coach and GAICD, with 25 years’ experience helping senior leaders navigate growth, transformation and career change.
The Problem
Career support wasn't built for you.
Most career support today was built for other needs, and very rarely do they wholly serve the individual.
Internal development happens on the company's timeline, for the company's requirements.
Outplacement can be specific and measured by throughput, you're a case to be closed, not a person to be helped.
And when it's time to move beyond the full-time role, the support usually stops at the financial plan. The identity, positioning and portfolio questions are left to you.
Your career has always mattered more to you than it has to anyone else.
We don’t think you should have to navigate it alone.
Positioning
Built from the other direction.
Bearings Advisory starts with the person…
… your situation, your pace, your definition of what a good outcome looks like.
We use structured digital tools to support and enhance individual’s thinking between sessions. The judgement, challenge and support stay human.
Digital where it helps. Human where it counts.
When careers change direction, we help you find yours, on your terms.
Who this is for
Built for the second half of your career.
Bearings Advisory is built for senior, experienced professionals in the second half of their career.
You may be stepping into a bigger role, a different organisational context, navigating change expected or unexpected, or deciding what comes next.
The common thread is not industry or the profession. It is working with you during a career moment that matters.
The Methodology
One Umbrella Brand.
Two Career Moments. Four Partnerships.
ACCELERATE
Stepping In or Up
The move into a new role, team or organisation, or up into a bigger remit. Reaching sustainable performance as early as the situation allows, not after a slow settling-in.
For those stepping into something new or up into more: a new organisation, a wider mandate, or the seat you have just earned.
Accelerate gives you a plan to build credibility and reach sustainable performance early, not a generic onboarding: practical, structured support to read the room, land early wins, and succeed on your own terms.
NAVIGATE
Changing Direction
The move out of full-time corporate life into a working life you build yourself. Reorienting when the ground shifts, forced or chosen, and moving forward with a clear plan.
For senior leaders at a crossroads, stepping away from a full-time role rather than searching for another one.
Navigate gives you the answers that may not be immediately obvious: who you are without the title, how you work without the machine behind you, and how to build a portfolio of board, advisory and consulting work, with the clarity and control to build it on your terms.
Four Partnerships: most career support stops at one dimension - your work.
Career change is a whole-of-life event.
It tests your relationship with yourself, with the people around you, with what you contribute, and with the future you're building toward.
Real resilience means addressing all four, not just the one everyone else focuses on.
SELF: The foundation everything else stands on, identity, health, emotional steadiness.
CONNECTION: The relationships that hold you up, and that you hold up in return.
CONTRIBUTION: What you give; to your work, your “craft”, and the people who depend on you.
FUTURE: Your relationship with time, growth and legacy, where you're headed, and what you're building toward.
This is where Bearings is different - we focus on the intersection of all four partnerships and believe you cannot navigate change nor transition successfully without consideration of all of them.
Distinct Products. Distinct conversations.
Why Bearings
Others move people through. We help people move forward.
One practitioner, not a marketplace. Decades of HR, organisational development and executive coaching experience sit behind every session. Not a rotating roster of whoever is free that week.
Built for the whole person, not the next role. Career change tests Self, Connection, Contribution and Future all at once. The framework is built around all four, not just the job title.
Meets you where you are, and grows as you do. Self-guided when that's what you need. Guided coaching when it's not. The support scales with you, not a fixed program you're forced to fit.
Digital where it helps. Human where it counts. Technology makes world-class support always available. Judgement at key moments stays human.
About
I’m Colin Hamilton. For 25 years I’ve worked inside the moments that define senior careers: growth, restructuring, transformation and the strategic resets that change what leadership actually requires.
As a Chief People Officer and global HR executive across financial services, professional services and travel management, I’ve led people decisions in complex, regulated, multi-business environments. But the work I care about most happens one leader at a time. The executive stepping into a bigger role. The professional navigating change they didn’t choose. The leader working out what comes after decades of running hard.
I’m IECL-qualified in executive coaching and GAICD qualified, with board-level fluency in leadership, succession, governance and people risk. I’ve sat on the side of the table that makes the tough calls and sat on the other to support and coach leaders following those tough calls.
My style is direct, constructive, focused on what actually moves you forward.
Bearings Advisory exists because I’ve watched too many capable leaders navigate the biggest moments of their career without anyone in their corner to support, guide and direct where required.
Find out more
Book a confidential 30-minute conversation.
In the first conversation, we clarify where you are, what has changed, what matters most, and whether Bearings is the right support.
You will leave with a clearer view of your situation, your immediate priorities and the best next step.
No pressure. No generic program. Just a useful conversation.
Confidentiality is critical. Career change can be sensitive. Every conversation is handled with discretion, care and respect for the commercial, personal and reputational context you are navigating.