Picture this — You’ve had a good career run in 2023 and you want to achieve more in the coming year. You have bits and pieces of ideas on how to grow professionally but you’re unsure of how to put all of these ideas and plans together. You’re in luck — this blog post will help you understand why setting career goals matter and will show you how to set and achieve your professional goals.
Career goals are simply specific targets you aim to achieve in your professional life, whether for the short or long term. They often align with personal aspirations and have been described as “the process of systematically matching career goals and individual capabilities with opportunities for their fulfillment.”
One of the importance of career goal setting is the sense of direction it gives. Goal setting helps you know the existing gaps in your career, the steps you need to take to bridge the gaps and the results to aim for per time. WIth goal setting you can know what you need to optimize for, certain career actions to be taken and even past actions that may no longer contribute to your growth in the coming year.
One other reason why you should consider career planning is its role in informed decision-making. For instance, if your goal is to attain a managerial position in the coming year, having a clear plan allows you to make sound decisions. Suppose you receive a job offer that offers double your current earnings but lacks the promise of a management position for the next four years. Career planning enables you to assess priorities and make decisions, ensuring that short-term financial gains don’t overshadow long-term career objectives. It acts as a compass in navigating the ‘either/or’ situations encountered on our career journeys.
So, how do you set effective career goals? First, there is no specific criteria to what makes a goal great or not as it differs from person to person. However, great goals often follow the SMART framework — Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Here are examples:
- Specific:
Instead of a vague goal — ‘I want to grow professionally in 2024’, you can instead list certain growth areas you want to double down on. It can be ‘become more confident in meetings and share ideas/ opinions on ABC’. With this, you know what you’re looking to achieve and what to do to meet this goal. For example it can be, ensuring you prepare adequately for meetings, listening to podcast on professional confidence, etc.
- Measurable:
Find a metric that clearly indicates success. It can be as simple as a sales target, the number of certifications obtained, the time you will dedicate to a goal or your salary expectations. Example — To achieve the goal of getting a cybersecurity certification, I will dedicate 8 hours a week to studying for it and set aside ABC monthly to pay for the exams.
- Actionable:
This involves thinking of what you can do to achieve your goals. Let’s assume your goal is to build a better relationship with your Manager, an action will be set up monthly/ bi-weekly one-on-one meetings with him/her.
- Realistic:
Keep goals realistic yet ambitious. Ensure they are within the bounds of achievability, allowing for growth without overwhelming yourself. Even if you don’t meet your goal in the time you set, you can re-evaluate and try again. Sometimes, says Tracy Timm, it is just about giving it your best shot. “When we’re older or even when we look back on our lives, it’s very rare that we regret something that we did that failed,” she says. “We regret more deeply the things that we never had the courage to do.”
- Time-bound:
Your goals should have a timeline- that is, a date or time frame setout for the accomplishment of what you’ve written. This helps keep you in check and ensures you spend time doing what actually matters.
There is no hard or fast route to goal setting. For the sake of clarity, here are 2 approaches to career goal setting.
Have a growth mindset:
Having this kind of mindset goes beyond believing that ‘you can improve/ get better’. It is more nuanced than just believing that improvement is possible. Having a growth mindset is about believing that developing and making progress is the point of what you’re doing. it’s about getting better instead of just being good. And, it’s about engaging in specific growth mindset strategies and habits to help keep you focused on the potential for growth in all you do.
When you approach goal setting with this perspective, you become more comfortable with uncertainty and more open to entertaining the idea of longer-term goals. You can use a growth mindset to trigger words that frame your goals. In research, studying the effects of this mindset involves describing the goal/ task to be performed using specific words that evoke the idea of getting better against that of being good. Examples are — improve, become, grow, develop, progress. With these words, your goals move from just doing to developing, and your mindset shifts alongside it. Let’s look at this example:
If you would normally write/ set a goal of increasing signups by 15%, the growth mindset trigger ‘words) will have you say instead — develop our network of leads to improve our sales by 15%.” Approaching goal setting with this mindset means that you move from setting goals just-because to a mental place where your goals are rooted in the mindset of growth, development, progress and improvement.
Set progress and pivot points:
It is very important to set progress and pivot points from the onset so you can track both your progress rate and the need to shift in light of new information that may come to you along the way.
Inspite of your good intentions and thoughts, it can be easy to lose sight of what you should be doing until you get closer to the timeline set for it. And if this happens, it will be hard to adjust when progress is low. You might find yourself holding on to a goal you should have revisited when certain parameters changed. For instance, you may set a goal for yourself of developing a specific skill by year’s end. To succeed, what should you accomplish in the first month? At six months? If you’re unaware, you won’t be able to correct and, if necessary, try a different strategy or set a revised goal to have the impact you want to see for yourself.
Setting progress and pivot points helps you understand what to do per time to meet a goal and provides you with necessary information needed to revise or change a goal.
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