Career Goals: Tips, Examples & How to Set Them For Yourself

1. What is a career goal?
2. Practical Tips for Setting Up Career Goals
3. Career Goal Setbacks and How to Avoid Them
4. Examples of Career Goals
5. Self-Knowledge and the Hope Factor

There are a number of career goals—job-related, school-related, value-related, etc.—each one influencing career outcomes. To ensure optimal results, one must construct a career goal to light the path of career development. It begins with the definition of what one seeks to accomplish and how to get there. But in order to start mapping out one’s career path, it is important to understand what a career goal is and how to effectively establish one first.

What is a career goal?

Fishbach and Ferguson (2007, p. 491) define goal as “a cognitive representation of a desired endpoint that impacts evaluations, emotions, and behaviors.” Brown (2002) further describes the goal as something that contains “important plans of action and encourages proactive behaviors on the part of individuals to meet milestones.”

In terms of career, goals not only pertain to long-term objectives, such as the ultimate professions or positions individuals intend to take, but also to the short-term ones or the milestones being set as they advance in their chosen profession. According to Sadowski & Schrager (2016), personal career goals should be represented by items an individual values from his/her “personal and unique perspective.” They further explained that personal career goals can either be “dreamy” or “practical,” depending on what is determined as ideal.

When it comes to the goal-setting process of students, particularly graduate students, Greco (2016, p. 4) argues that being able to identify with the profession “shapes the career goals of graduate students in professional programs.” Not every goal, however, includes the path of higher education as there are those who skip this part with their own reasons to not go to college. Meanwhile, the process of professional identification is based on the four psychological motives—identity development, control, meaning, and belonging.

Practical Tips for Setting Up Career Goals

The key factor in accomplishing any goal set is to first have a clear vision of what an individual wants to try to achieve before taking action to reach it (UC Berkeley, n.d.). It is, however, important to remember that “there’s no blueprint or timetable for climbing the career ladder” (Doyle, 2020). The path toward the ultimate goal does not need to be a straight line as it includes milestones, such as jobs, timeline, etc., that might change along the way. Also, restarting and refocusing career goals is also not unusual and must not be considered as a sign of failure.

Two of the most important factors to consider when setting your goals is your goals must be reasonable and achievable. This, however, does not mean that you cannot dream big—you can as long as you set realistically feasible goals to accomplish it (Links International, 2019).

There are several helpful strategies when it comes to setting up career goals and working your way toward them. In corporate organizations, goal alignment is one of the driving forces behind achieving company-wide goals. This concept can also be applied to personal career goals, such as the following:

• Aligning career goals with performance. Consistent performance improvement plays a significant role in advancing toward your goal. During performance reviews, pay attention to the areas you are struggling with and focus on improving them. Also, keep your performance improvement measurable; you can do this by creating benchmarks by which you can track your progress (Links International, 2019).
• Aligning career goals with specific skills, interests, talents. Discovering careers that matches you best is easier when you have self-knowledge as well as in choose a major, degree, and electives that can further enhance . Knowing your personality, skills, and interests can help you in your career decision-making process. This process not only involves identifying which areas you are good at but also determining if these areas interest you or not.
• Aligning career goals with market/employment earning potentials. This stage can happen during academic years. According to Ng (2018), when it comes to academic learning, students have consistently taken the importance of employment and career into consideration. For example, if a student’s ultimate goal is to establish their own business, they can seek opportunities to expand their entrepreneurship mindset, confidence, and skills through action-based entrepreneurship and innovation training offered by academic institutions (Chu & Ang, 2017).
• Aligning career goals with core values. “An alignment between your career and your core values produces satisfaction, a sense of happiness, and fulfillment” (Loffredo, 2017). These core values refer to your principles which, if not aligned with the organization you are working for, can cause unhappiness and disruptions on your journey toward achieving your goals in life.
• Aligning career goals with life goals. Personal and professional goals must not pull you into two separate directions. While establishing a balance between your career goal and personal goal may be difficult, it is important to take both into consideration when making important career decisions either can turn into roadblocks instead of stepping stones. For example, if moving to and living in a different country is a significant part of your personal goal, your career path must not only hold you back from accomplishing this but also prepare you for the time when you have to live in a different country. This process involves taking control as it helps individuals become responsible for meeting the future by using effort and persistence and for shaping themselves and their environment. In a survey conducted among millennials in the United Kingdom, achieving career goals placed sixth in the list of the respondents’ top life goals. It is, however, also important to note that a successful career plays a significant role in achieving the majority of life goals in the list.

Career Goal Setbacks and How to Avoid Them

Psychotherapist Amy Morin identifies the common obstacles to an individual’s dreams and goals and here are some of them:

• Nurturing the “someday” syndrome. Delaying your goals will never help you accomplish them. This is the reason why it is important to create a timeline and stick to it.
• Waiting for yourself to be ready. Finding an inspiration that can motivate you to start working toward your career goals can place you in uncertain circumstances. In situations such as this, it is necessary to deal with the behavior first. If this behavior is habitual, it can leave a significant negative impact on your career plans.
• Being unprepared for the hard times. Challenges are part of every journey. As you work toward your goals, it is important to consider the kind of hardships you might have to deal with and plan ahead.
• Thinking that mistakes are failures. Anticipate that the journey toward your ultimate goal will not always be smooth sailing. There will be times when mistakes will be made and force you to step back and reconsider. These mistakes, however, should not be taken as signs that you are failing in your own plan. It is important to keep your focus and get back on track.
• Poor prioritization. There may be times when it would seem like a lot of things are happening in your life at the same time. During these moments, career goals may have to be pushed to the back burner.
• Setting the bar too high. This is not an issue of dreaming big but having only that dream as the focus of your career path. This is why it is recommended to establish milestones that can help you achieve your dream step by step instead of heading straight toward your ultimate goal to avoid the long and arduous process of achieving it.

Examples of Career Goals

Goals are made up of short-term and long-term components. Here are some career goals examples for each category.

Short-term career goals

These goals involve setting up realistic milestones that are achievable within the foreseeable future usually meant to accomplish immediate improvements, such as the following:

• Increasing productivity
• Improving communication skills
• Earning a professional certificate

Long-term goals

These are the goals set to be accomplished within a longer time frame as it involves more planning and can have a more significant effect on the overall career plan. Some examples of professional goals intended for long-term are the following:

• Getting a promotion
• Career change
• Building a personal brand

Self-Knowledge and the Hope Factor

Lyons et al. (2015) stated that individuals with a strong self-awareness of their core career competencies tend to be more resilient and experience more satisfaction as they progress toward their career goals. Furthermore, people who possess a high level of understanding of the careers they want to pursue also have more focused and realistic plans for their future “that are based on accurate information about their personal strengths and weaknesses” (Brotheridge & Power, 2008).

But while self-knowledge provides an individual with a certain level of awareness that helps in creating an effective career plan, there is one more component that has a special relationship with goals and that is hope. While hope may sound like putting a dramatic spin on the subject of career goals, Savickas and Porfeli (2012) described it as “a psychological source of career adaptability.” And according to Snyder (1996), hope provides the ability to create clear and meaningful goals, as well as become a powerful source of willpower—both of which are extremely necessary for establishing career goals, and most importantly, in achieving them.

 

References

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