The coach approach career counseling is on the money at Deloitte: at Deloitte & Touche, full-time career coaches are only the beginning of the story. The goal is to make coaching part of everyday work--for 35,000 employees.(Cover story)

Jane Johnston went to work in Chicago for Deloitte & Touche USA LLP in 2002, following the collapse of the accounting and consulting giant's former rival, Arthur Andersen, in the wake of the Enron scandal. She had been a Web editor at Andersen and was happy to accept a job as editor of the U.S. version of deloitte.com, her new company's main public presence on the Web.

"I had probably the best Web site job at Deloitte," Johnston says. But by 2005, after three years of doing essentially the same job at the new firm that she had done for years at the old one, she began to grow restless.

So Johnston went to see Blaze Konkol, the Chicago office's designated career coach and one of 13 full-time U.S. coaches employed by the firm under a program called Deloitte Career Connections. In strict confidentiality, Johnston explained her frustration: "I've been doing this for a long time, but I don't want to leave Deloitte."

Konkol first arranged for her to meet with several people who had different types of writing jobs in the company. Nothing especially appealed to her. So he suggested that she look for ways to "refresh" her current job. For instance, she says, "We were going to originate podcasts [on topics such as 'the aging consumer'] for the external Web site. I volunteered to create a template for the podcast script and to write the first one."

Jumping into projects like that one helped keep her engaged for a year, she says. Then a tempting job opening came up: content manager for the knowledge-management group supporting Deloitte's audit and enterprise risk services (AERS) business.

Johnston started in that new role in July. It's still Web work, but now for an internal site serving a particular part of Deloitte. "The beauty is that working within a particular practice area gives me a whole new view …