Creating Goals For Your Career

Should you be creating goals for your career?

The answer to that question is a matter of personal choice for each of us. Goal-setting is not for everyone. To make the best choice you should be aware of the many benefits that creating career goals can bring at all different stages of your professional life.

Creating Goals For Your Career When You’re A New Hire

Ahh…the first 90 days on the job. You are eager to make a good impression, largely unfamiliar with your new work environment and position and under the microscope in a big way. What an excellent combination!

Goal-setting for your first days and weeks on the job can be extremely helpful. In the first place it changes the dynamic. You have an alternative to being the newbie with a good attitude closely watched from all directions. Goal-setting frees you to be the self-directed and more self-confident despite being new to the team. You can pursue your agenda in the context of learning the ropes and draw power and calm from doing so.

A second benefit of goal-setting at this juncture is the organization it brings to this crucial period. The process of creating career goals will lead you naturally to focus on different aspects of being a new hire. You’ll look at team organization and relationships within the team, communications styles, work styles, project participation and more. And you will make a plan to prioritize your attention to these areas that will promote, enhance and cement the value your hiring brings to the enterprise.

Creating career goals as a new hire may also boost your performance during these first important months. One principle that is an absolute cornerstone of goal-setting theory is Latham & Locke’s finding that setting specific high goals leads to higher performance than setting abstract goals. We can presume that most new hires share the abstract goal of creating a good impression or getting off to a good start. Goal-setting allows you to set specific high goals for this period. Correspondingly high performance should follow.

Benefiting from Creating Career Goals at Any Point in Your Career

Goal-setting offers significant benefits throughout your tenure on the job.

The fact is that career lows are just as much a reality as career highs. We all experience periods when work feels more negative, somehow less bearable, than other times. Creating career goals is one way to fight that drudgery when it sets in. Setting a challenge for yourself in the form of one or more goals for your career can revitalize your approach to the workday. The facts of your job may not change but by approaching them as someone on a quest for success and achievement you can profoundly reinvigorate your daily experience.

Goal-setting can also strongly enhance a bid for a promotion or transfer. Here again the organization creating goals for your career provides is key. Meriting a promotion may require several components such as managerial and co-worker support, commendable performance and demonstrable results. The goal-setting process will focus you on weak areas and position you for success.

Creating goals for your career gives you control. What you need and want from your career will vary over time. Your position may be a stepping stone on the way to future plans or the easiest means to support your family and fund your retirement. The goal-setting process creates powerful self-knowledge. It forces you to analyze your professional status and how it fits with the rest of your life at a given point in time. With this knowledge you are informed and ready to set a course for the future. You can choose to go along as you have been or make changes as you think appropriate. Your goals position you in the driver’s seat.

And isn’t that, at any stage of your professional life, exactly where you want to be.

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