Career Goal

A career goal is a statement that defines what you want to achieve in your professional life throughout your career. It's a target that allows you to set an action plan and work towards achieving your ambitions.

Career goals can be either short-term or long-term, depending on how hard you work towards your plans and how much time you put into reaching your target. However, they can bring you closer to your ambitions, aspirations, and what you can get out of your position.

They impact people in achieving their successes, striving to work hard, and becoming the best people they can be. It can be short-term, like getting a promotion, or long-term, like running a business.

In this article, I will walk you through how career goals are beneficial in your professional life, give some examples of career goals to use, give examples of short and long-term goals, and learn other types of goals and how they correlate with each other.

Understanding career goals and how to achieve them

Career goals take a lot of time to plan. To work towards them, you must think about your short-term and long-term goals and how to reach them. These will help build the stepping stones of your professional work life.

Career goals are useful to people like me who just graduated from college or a university and want to find a job. They are also useful for me in planning my future working career so I can succeed further down in life.

Let's just say your long-term goal is that of a marketing manager. To achieve your long-term plan, you have to start with short-term goals, like talking to peers to help find a strategy, attending relevant events to get more knowledge, creating marketing plans, etc.

From there, you'll have to create and follow a plan by ensuring they are realistic and achievable. You can do this by researching, looking for careers that match your interests and skills, and setting time frames to stick with.

When you're done creating your plan, review it to see if it suits you. If circumstances change, adjust your plan to how it will fit within your time frame. You can change things in your plan to reflect these developments as things change.

Once you have achieved them, you can make another one and follow the steps above to plan your other career goals.

Short-Term Vs. Long-Term Career Goals

Short-term career goals are smaller stepping stones people take to reach their long-term aspirations. It can take weeks, days, or months for them to be reached and provide applicants to learn new skills and set milestones to advance their career paths.

Some examples of STCGs include:

• Finding a new job
• Landing a promotion
• Getting a certificate
• Preparing for job interviews
• Learning to take accountability
• Acquiring new skills
• Making a plan

On the flip side, long-term career goals are professional aspirations that you set for a long period. They can be achieved within a year, 5 years, or a decade. There is no specific deadline, but you still know what you want to accomplish by the end of your working life.

Examples of LTCGs include:

• Improving your abilities
• Developing leadership skills
• Merging career and personal objectives together
• Building a professional network
• Starting a new business

These two types of goals are useful for me in planning out how I want my career and the steps I need to ensure that I am on the right path to success in the workforce.

SMART Goals

One way to measure your career goals is by using SMART. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic (or Relevant), and Timely. This helps set targets and objectives, which will lead to better results.

SMART is a helpful tool if you are looking at how to plan your future. You want to ensure that the plans are specified; that they are measurable; that you can easily achieve them; that they are realistic to meet, and that they can be attained in a timely and efficient manner.

The S in SMART stands for specific. In this step, you'll want to think about the mission statement. Ask yourself:

• Who's involved?
• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What steps are needed to follow through?
• Why is it important to you?

The next step is to measure it. This is a good indicator of how successful a goal can be. You can measure it through reports, surveys, samples, tests, work products, and other data types.

From here, you want to ensure it's achievable and attainable. You'll have to think about how you can accomplish it if you have the skillset and consider how to attain them if you have not.

Then, you'll want to ensure it's realistic or relevant. Finally, ensure that its alignment with other relevant plans matters to you and that your plan drives everyone forward.

Finally, you want to ensure that your idea is time-bound, meaning that your target has a deadline to focus on, so you can work towards achieving your idea. Ask:

• When can you work on it?
• When can you get it done?
• What can I do now?
• What can I do a few weeks from now?

Researched and authored by Marcu Andrei Dumitrescu | LinkedIn

Reviewed and edited by Parul Gupta | LinkedIn

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