Your Career Goal Setting Guide

Career goal setting helps with the tough choices concerning the future career you want or how to get the most out of your current career. Setting career goals is easy with these goal setting forms that maximize your goal setting success.

Whether you want to:

• get that promotion
• earn a higher salary
• work less
• find that dream job

...having clear and concise career goals makes it much easier to achieve success.
Career goal setting can be the difference between success and failure.

Setting career goals can be the reason why one person loves their work and moves up in the business world and the other finds their work stressful and lacking purpose.

Career goal setting helps you to focus on what you want to do for a living. It can open up a new horizon of job opportunities and career paths.

Career goal setting

Every year millions of people set goals only to set the same goals the following year.

Here we provide a blueprint for setting career goals in a number of clear steps.

Having a blueprint of how you are going to achieve your career goals greatly increases your chance of goal setting success.

The 6 steps to your plan include:

1. Developing a clear vision of your career
2. Writing your long term career goals down
3. Identifying the actions that support your long-term career goals
4. Developing short-term goals
5. Creating a career goal setting plan for short-term goals
6. Reviewing your career goal setting progress

1. Developing a clear career vision

What do you want out of your career?

Do you want a high-achieving job?

Would you like meaningful work that gives you a great deal of satisfaction?

Would you like a job that is stress-free?

Sometimes it can be difficult to brainstorm your career goals.

Often, brainstorming your career goals is helped by asking yourself:

• What is your dream job?
• If you couldn’t fail, what would you want to do?
• How do you want to be remembered for the work that you do?

Practice 'No Limit' Thinking Wave a magic wand over your career - allow yourself to practice 'no limit' thinking. Imagine a vision of your perfect career. What would you be doing? Who would you be working with? What is your level of responsibility? What types of skills do you need? No limit thinking can allow your true career goals to emerge. These goal setting activities are a right-brain activity that help you to develop a clear personal vision which is the foundation for setting and achieving goals.

2. Writing goals: Long-term career goals

You've dreamed big and now that you have a vision that is grounded in your values, it is time to set some concrete goals.

Download your setting career goals plan and identify one value or intention and write a long-term goal that reflects this value or intention.

By putting your goals onto paper you transform your goals from the abstract to the concrete!

Concrete goals force you to think in a specific manner about your goal, and whether or not you are willing to make the effort to achieve your goals.

For example, let’s take the goal "I want to be a good salesperson."

This is a general goal and can be made more specific such as "I want to increase sales by 50%."

The advantage of a specific goal is that it gives you something clear to aim for and is easily measurable.

Setting SMART goals SMART goals is an acronym for setting goals that are specific, measurable, action-based, realistic and time-bound. By setting SMART goals you harness a proven and effective goal setting strategy for success. SMART goals focus your attention on goals and allow you to review your goal progress with ease.

3. Identify actions to achieve career goals

Now that you have set long-term career goals it is important that you identify what actions support your goals.

What strategies or plans can you put into place that will help you to achieve your career goals?

Do you need to learn new skills?

Do you want to manage your time better?

What activities can help you to achieve your career goals?

This forms the basis for setting your short-term career goals - the building blocks to long-term success.

4. Developing short-term career goals

To achieve career goal setting success it is important to break your goals into manageable, bite-sized chunks.

This involves making short-term goals out of your long-term career goals.

If you can think of the top of a staircase as achieving your long-term goals, each step can be thought of as a short-term goal.

Each step up the staircase is the completion of a short-term goal that takes you a step closer to your ultimate goal.

So the general goal of a sales manager can be made into a number of more specific short-term goals.

For example, it may include:

• exceeding the monthly sales quota
• opening 2 new accounts per week
• improving selling techniques
• completing paper work on time

What is important is that you brainstorm a list of short-term goals that enable you to reach your long-term goals. These goal setting templates are beneficial to brainstorm your short-term career goals.

Prioritize Your Career Goals When setting career goals, a common error is to set too many. It is important to prioritize your career goals in order of importance. The most important career goals are those that you should tackle first. This goal setting activity helps prioritize your career goals and overall lifestyle goals.

5. Creating a goal setting plan for short-term career goals

Each short-term goal has a number of actions that need to be completed to achieve your short-term goal. In your plan of action, consider:

• what resources you need to achieve your short-term goal
• what new skills you need to develop or what training you need to do
• the possible obstacles that you may encounter in achieving your goal
• if you need to collaborate with others to achieve your goal.

Download your free short-term goal plan for setting career goals.

For example a typical action plan for the goal of becoming a better salesperson may be to make more calls, attend sales courses, read trade journals, and discover new prospects.

As an example, see my short-term goal setting plan for lecturing at university.

Related goal setting articles

Goal Setting Course: Structured Goal Setting Lesson Plans

Goal Setting Worksheet: Identify the Life Areas Most Important for Setting Goals

Goal Setting Quotes: Inspirational Goal Setting Quotes

Goal Setting Plan: Plan Your Goal Blueprint for Success

Goal Setting Forms: Forms to Download for Goal Setting