Why do you need career goals?

Setting a career goal is about determining where do you want to head toward in your career. Once you identify your goals, you can develop a plan to gather resources, layout steps, and take action to achieve those goals. Everything you do will be structuralized and efficient.

Some common career goals to consider:

  1. Increase your professional knowledge in a field of interest to eventually become an expert.
  2. Gain new experience that you never had before by working in a new field, making new connections, and cultivating new skills.
  3. Reach a leadership position is important to many people. Eventually, you may want to leverage your skills and experience to influence others to work towards a common vision in an organization.
  4. Achieve or increase your earning by pursuing a career. This earning can then satisfy your personal needs in many ways.
  5. Start your own business after gaining knowledge and experience and apply it to create your own company and design your own work.
Set S.M.A.R.T goals

S.M.A.R.T model is the most popular tool to use when we talk about setting effective and achievable goals in your career. The acronyms stand for:

 

Specific: your goals need to be simple, detailed, and clear. Try to ask yourself some questions:

What do I want to accomplish?

Who is involved?

What type of resources do I need?

Measurable: your goals need to be measurable so that you can set deadlines, track your progress and evaluate your performance. Thinking about these questions:

How much time should I invest in this

How many types of training I need to participate

How will I know when my goals are accomplished?

Achievable: most of the time people fail to achieve their goals either because those goals are too unrealistic or too hard to attain. Think about:

How can I accomplish this goal?

Do I have enough resources, financial factors and time to achieve this?

What are the constraints that hold me back?

Relevant: This step is about ensuring that your goal matters to you, and that it also aligns with other relevant goals. It also related back to achievable and specific goal setting. Think about the answers to these questions:

Is this what I really want to pursue?

Is this worth the effort, time and energy?

Is this goal relevant to my skills and abilities?

TImely: a goal should be grounded within a time period so that you can establish deadlines, design steps and motivate yourself to start taking action. Consider:

When do you want to begin?

How long will it take you to complete each step?

What can I do today? What can I do a month from now?