Setting Career Goals

When setting career goals, compare your current position and the place you hope to ultimately take your career. Remember to keep your goals realistic and to revisit your progress periodically.

Tutorial

For many people, careers are chosen early in life. For others, college graduation looms on the horizon and the soon-to-be-grad still doesn’t know what he plans to do with the rest of his life. There are some innovative ways of trying to decide on a career and where you want that career to go, but the end result is that you’ll have to be the driving force behind that decision if you want the career to be successful.

Write Your Goals Down

You should start setting your career goals with a written plan. At the top of your plan, indicate your current position. Are you still in school? Have you graduated and have your first job? Maybe you’re already established in your field but want to firmly outline where you hope to go in your career. All are legitimate times to set some solid career goals.

At the end of your list, you’ll have your ultimate goal. You might hope to someday be chairman of your company. If that’s a totally unrealistic goal, you may need to rethink your current position. Is it unrealistic because you don’t have what it takes to be the chairman? Or is it unrealistic because there’s too little upward movement in this company. If it’s the first, some additional training, education and experience will be necessary steps along the middle part of your career goals list. If it’s the latter, you may need to rethink your employment and start looking for a company that has room for advancement.

After you’ve outlined where you stand currently and where you hope to eventually take your career, the only thing left for you to do is figure out how to get there. Remember to set realistic, attainable steps along the way and to periodically revisit your goals to keep yourself on track.