Last week we gave you 5 tips to help you manage your career. Today we are going to expand on the first tip: set career goals. Career goals are important since you cannot get where you are going if you don’t know where it is. Your career goals is where you intend to go with your career.
Time Horizons
The late Dr. Stephen Covey would state it, “Begin with the end in mind.” Where do you want to be at the end of your career? If that is too hard, determine your goal that is furthest out. What position do you want to retire from? Is there a particular financial or professional status you want to achieve?
Knowing your long term goal helps you in determining what the stepping stones are to get there. As you come up with those milestones, write down an additional goal for that specific milestone. Have a goal for each of the big stones.
Your Goals
Whatever you have will be individual to you. Reflect on your goals. Are they really yours or are they someone else’s? Are they Dad’s goals for you? Or Mom’s? Your spouse’s? It is perfectly fine if your goals are in harmony with others. It is good if your spouse agrees with your goals, but is is more important that he or she supports you in your own goals.
If you are trying to achieve the goals others have for you that are not your own, you will either fail because you don’t really care to succeed or you will succeed and hate yourself for having done so. You need to live your own dream, not the one your parents had for you.
Develop a Plan of Action
Goals are no good if you don’t act on them. You don’t need to act right away; just having the goal looking you in the face may be enough to spur you into action. Your career goals are frequently long term goals. You will not achieve them overnight and a lot of work will be required to accomplish them. Take the time to plan out what you intend to do so that you can reach your next goal and make it one mile further on the road to your dream career. You should not expect to plan our your entire career from now to twenty or thirty years from now. You can, however, develop a plan to reach your shorter term goal and get you up one more run on the ladder leading to your career success.
Conclusion
Developing career goals that are truly yours will help you keep your actions focused and working toward that objective. It will also allow you to put your short term sacrifices into context and make them more bearable. You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is. Developing career goals and regularly reviewing them will help you figure out where that is and enable you to get yourself there.