Tips from the Career Coaches: How to Create Powerful Career Goals
Are you happy with where you are in your career? Do you feel you’re on the right path to where you want to be? Or could you be doing more toward reaching your career goals?
When I start working with many coaching clients, I find their career paths have often been a series of random events where they meet people or come across opportunities that led to a promotion or new job. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does leave a lot to chance, and relies on external events that you have no control over. Helping them with structure and goals puts them in the driving seat of their professional future and keeps their career moving forward in a purposeful way. Here are my top tips if you’d like to do the same:
Creating good career goals might sound overwhelming, but it’s very easy to get started. In fact, it’s a lot like planning a journey where you define where you are starting from, where you want to go, what you will need to get you there and how you will know you’ve arrived.
Step 1 – Where You Are
Think about your latest role and how you came to be in it. Make notes on what you do, what skills, knowledge and experience you use, your values, what you enjoy and what keeps you engaged. If you get stuck, you could try some online self-assessment tools to help you identify your personality traits, interests and top skills.
Then, ask yourself these questions:
- What does ‘happy at work’ mean to me?
- Is my career progressing and keeping me motivated? Is everything as I want it to be?
- What more could I be doing, using and/or learning?
- Are my personal and professional lives in balance?
- Do my personal and professional values align?
Consider both sides – what is great and what might be missing or out of alignment. This exercise isn’t just about working out what needs to be fixed, it’s also working out the good stuff and thinking about how it could be even better.
Step 2 – Where You Want To Go
We can’t achieve our career goals unless we try to understand what they are and why they are meaningful to us. So, what does a successful career mean to you? What would it look like? Gather information from friends and colleagues about the jobs they do that interest you (and the realities), and research roles online so you feel informed.
Armed with this data, asking yourself more questions – and perhaps brainstorming with a career coach, friend or mentor – can help you understand what you are looking to achieve:
- What would make me feel my career was more rewarding?
- What more could I do to build my skills, knowledge and experience?
Ask these questions but then ask yourself ‘why’. By asking why you want each or any of these things you can identify what they will bring you. For example, ‘I want to boost my skills so I can work on bigger projects and make a greater contribution.’ By pinpointing the ‘why’ we can shape our plan and set out our career goals.
Step 3 – How You Are Going To Get There
Once you identify your direction, reasons and desired outcomes you can start to think about how to achieve them and the key to success is to set goals. This enables you to take ownership of what you want, where you want to be and by when. It may help to start with the end outcome and work backwards, identifying the incremental steps you need to take to get you to your destination.
You can’t hit a target you can’t see clearly, so goals need to be well defined, which is where the SMART model comes in. There are variations of what the SMART acronym stands for, but this is the one I use and find most useful for career goals examples:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Specific
Try to pinpoint what it is you want to achieve. Would you like to be promoted within your team? Boost your skills? Learn about a new area of the business? Change your direction? You might think ‘I want to change role into project management’ but as a goal but it’s very general. Identifying the desired outcome – the ‘why’ – helps you be more specific. For example, ‘I want to be more challenged in my work and build on my existing project experience to move up to be a project lead.’
Measurable
Many people want to ‘be more challenged or ‘earn more money’ but these are not specific goals and have no measure of success. Adding metrics provides clarity – What would a challenge look like in practice? How much do you want to earn? The aim is to identify what will change as a result of the action you take. That gives you the measure of whether or not you’ve achieved it.
Attainable
Based on your current professional, financial, geographical and personal circumstances, how attainable is the career goal that you want? Do you have the resources at this time to achieve it? Who can help you? Be ambitious with your career goals but break them into smaller steps so they are achievable. Wanting to be a Sales Manager could be a career goal, but do you have qualifications, experience and connections to achieve that at this time? If not, what are the realistic stepping stones you can identify to lead you to that position?
Relevant
Knowing why you want something is vital to success but equally, your goals need to align with your values and desired lifestyle. Maybe you want to earn a high salary at an investment bank in the City, but would that role support your values and desired working hours? Maybe you’d like to work for a charity making a difference in society, but will that provide enough for you to live on. Think about your personality, preferences, values and the practicalities of your situation to keep your career goals relevant.
Time-bound
When do you want to achieve the goal? Remember to stretch yourself here. If it’s too easy, it will have no influence and if it’s too challenging and you don’t achieve it, it will negatively impact your motivation. Find a balance between the two, be specific with your deadlines for daily, weekly and monthly actions and avoid vague timelines such as ‘by next year.’ As we’ve said before, challenge yourself, but not so far that it’s unrealistic. Then break that longer-term goal into smaller, short-term actions. Consider if you already have the experience for the role you want. If not, what could you do to get the experience? Who can help you? What actions can you take? When?
Step 4 – Put Your Plan into Action and Achieve Your Goals
Having a clearly defined career plan with realistic and achievable career goals helps you make positive decisions about your future. Plans don’t have to be perfect, it’s more important to take action and start than procrastinating over polishing up the perfect plan. Communicate your goals, ask for input and help and make yourself accountable for your progress.
Keep track of your actions so you can measure your progress but be kind to yourself; things may slip, so if they do, revisit your goals and take a realistic look at your activities and timeline, adjusting where necessary. Creating a clear plan and goals puts you in control of your career and ensures you don’t leave your success to chance. After all, once you know where you’re going, you can work out how to get there.
For more insight on how to achieve your career goals, explore our career advice section. Here you’ll find additional articles by leading career coaches and experts as well as job search guides, CV and cover letter writing templates and much more.
This guest article is number one in our series of Tips from the Career Coaches from Randstad RiseSmart. Risesmart’s dedicated and highly-qualified career coaches are employed by companies to help transitioning employees - internally or externally - access valuable resources, expedite job searches and land a new role faster.
Louise Newton is an experienced Career Coach and Certified Transition Coach based at Randstad RiseSmart.