Excellence Awards 2026: Alexandra Makarovski — why career clarity matters more than career success

Alexandra Makarovski has built her career coaching practice around a question most professionals rarely ask out loud.

There is a particular kind of professional stuck that does not show up on a CV. The title is right. The salary is solid. The LinkedIn profile looks impressive. And yet, somewhere between the morning alarm and another back-to-back meeting, something quietly asks: Is this it?

She hears this more times than she can count — not as a confession, but as a recurring pattern in conversations. "I'm a bit stuck," someone will say, or, "I'm thinking about my options." But beneath those words, they are often asking the same question: I've built something that looks like success. Why doesn't it feel like it?

It is a question professionals are increasingly willing to sit with. It is also the work Alexandra has dedicated her practice to as an ICF-certified career coach and founder of Inner Me Coaching, recently named the Best Career Coach in Excellence in Business category at the 2026 Gulf News x BeingShe Excellence Awards. Career clarity is not an abstract idea. For many professionals, it is the difference between years of momentum and years of drift.

She is not a recruiter. She is not there to tell her clients what to do. She works as a thinking partner — structured, grounded, and deeply practical — for professionals who are capable but directionally lost. Her clients are mid-career professionals across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the wider UAE. Many have, in their own words, outgrown the career they worked so hard to build.

A common thread Alexandra notices is uncertainty about what comes next. They have a stable career on paper, but something feels misaligned. They cannot quite name it, and they are not sure they are allowed to want something different when, by every external measure, things look fine. That disconnect between external stability and internal alignment is often what brings someone to coaching.

Her approach begins with values, not job titles. What kind of work would actually energise this person, not just pay them? From there, she helps her clients map realistic directions and explore how those align with the actual market before making any move. Clarity before action. Direction before decisions.

One client comes to her mind. He came to Alexandra after several months of job searching without a single interview. On paper, his approach was sound — consistent applications, a strong LinkedIn profile, steady execution. But as they worked together, something became clear: the gap was not strategy. It was clarity. He was not sure what kind of work would genuinely energise him, beyond what simply looked familiar from his past roles.

Using her career clarity framework, they explored his strengths, his interests, and the kinds of problems he wanted to solve. His self-rated career clarity moved from around two out of ten to eight or nine. Once he could see what he was genuinely aiming for, everything shifted, his CV, his LinkedIn presence, and his visibility all aligned with roles where he would thrive, not just cope.

The second shift was around networking. He understood it mattered, but something in him resisted. It felt uncomfortable, even forced. Through their sessions, he reframed it: not self-promotion, but intentional relationship-building. Once that perspective shifted, outreach became a natural part of how he showed up.

On the first day he combined focused applications with intentional outreach, he received an interview request after months of silence. The work was his. The clarity was his. What coaching provided was a structured way to get there.

Alexandra is always careful about what she promises. She cannot find anyone a job, and she does not offer guarantees. What she offers is a structured process for getting genuinely clear on what you want, why it matters, and how to move towards it in a way that is grounded in the real market you are operating in.

For professionals across the UAE who recognise that feeling, a good career on paper, but something quietly misaligned, clarity is more accessible than it might feel right now.

To learn more, visit www.innermecoaching.com