A Guide To Yearly Career Goal Setting
Any “new beginnings” always has my attention, be it a move to a new city, a new friendship and of course a new year. New beginnings gives me a sense of “a better attempt”. Yes, we all know at times, we make resolutions at the beginning of the year but might become less dedicated to them by March. However, the attempt to try does matter. The mood and positivity the new year brings gives us the opportunity to start something new, rethink bad habits or gain new ones.
Professionally, we can cease the resolution mindset to draft out our career goal for the year and dive into the specifics of what we want to achieve. I will be sharing with you the approach I used in creating my career goal for this year. I broke my goals into 4 major sections. Quantitative Expertise, Business Knowledge, Leadership, and Relational Development. Before we discuss each of this, drafting a 5-year career road map before diving into goals for the year is very vital. There are various ways to create a 5-year goal map, but the main idea is to really think about where you want to be and what you want to be doing in 5 years. Write down the goals and be very specific and intentional.
An example of a goal can be to create a mentoring platform for professionals that will help match mentors and mentees across companies and industries. To make this goal measurable, we could even specify how many active members we will like to have in the first year. Allow me to diverge a bit to say your career goal does not only have to apply to your current role or an aspiring position. Go broad, include ideas you wish to start, whether it is public speaking, coaching students aspiring to work in your field, expanding your network and so forth. Include professional activities you want to be involved in outside of work as well.
Once you’ve written down your 5-year goals, the next step will be to break it down into “yearly chunks”. What incremental progress will you need to make each year towards your goal? Using our mentoring platform example, a sample year-one goal could be to acquire mentors within and outside your field. And a year-two goal can be to become a mentor to one or two people, and apply experiences from your own mentor-mentee relationship. Apply this process to each of your goals. At the end, you are now ready to further dive into your year-one goals.
Quantitative Expertise
Let’s now discuss the 4 major sections I introduced earlier. The first is Quantitative Expertise. This section will focus on the specific tools or skills you need to acquire that will maximize your deliverables. For instance, if you are a software developer and you expect that some of your applications will soon be hosted in the cloud rather than in-house, a goal can be to become a certified cloud architect. You can also have a goal to begin to understand the ins-and-outs of cloud native applications for possible new projects. Along with listing out the tools, remember to include the means you will go about learning it, be it on the job training, books, certifications or open source material online.
Business Knowledge
The next section of your career goal for the year will be Business Knowledge. This is different from Quantitative Expertise, it focuses on your full understanding of the consumer of your work. It is the “why” behind your Quantitative Expertise. Who is the consumer of your product? What does the ins-and-outs of their job entail? How do they use the product you have created? Are you familiar with some of the “business language” used by your consumer? This is one that can often be overlooked by technical professionals. It is possible to develop an application without fully understanding the business. However, understanding your client no matter how “non-client facing” you are is vital to curating your product to meet the client’s real needs. Yes, you can be handed the exact requirements but understanding your clients allows for creativity. It allows you to think about problems the client or the professional responsible for gathering the requirements might have overlooked.
Leadership
The third career goal section is Leadership. A few might ignore this based on the fact that they do not hold any position of authority at work. However, the irony is, leadership almost always comes before the title. You can be a leader while being an individual contributor on a team. Daily, we are provided countless number of opportunities to take on leadership positions. It might not be obvious, but if we take the time to look, to think about the needs of our team, the opportunity is right there in front of us. Note that leadership does not only entail people management. You can choose to be a tehcnical leader as well. So how can you be a leader on your team? Is it picking up the role of planning team bonding activities? Proposing a better architectural design for processes? Finding ways to refactor legacy products to better meet the growing market demands? Assiting a new hire to get up to speed? Pitching a new pipeline for production deployments? Could it be coming up with a new company-wide intiative, and working the details out with the HR or the innovation team at your company? Think about what excites you. There’s a role needing your leadership and creativity skills.
Relational Development
The last section in my career goal plan is Relational Development. This section is very people focused. It can include specific means to broaden your network. Identify areas of weakness and finding a mentor or coach to assist you with it, becoming a mentor to someone or building relationships with potential sponsors at your company. Side note, it is very important to understand the difference between a mentor, a coach and a sponsor. I cannot over emphasize the impact each can play on your career growth. The Relational Development section can also include professional clubs/organizations within and outside your firm you are interested in joining. It can also include goals of working towards a stronger relationship with co-workers and clients. What are those connections or qualitative skills that once built, can substantially impact the trajectory of your career growth?
Conclusion
The first attempt to career success is creating a plan but to achieve success, ensure you set up means that enables you to follow through. One of those means is accountability. You can implement this by discussing your goals with your manager. If you currently do not have a structured check-ins, create one. Tell your manager about your goals and ask if you both can meet at specified times you decide to discuss your progress. Managers are there not only to ensure we are delivering and meeting up to expectations, but also to assist us in achieving our all-round goals, be it quantitative or qualitative. Another great tool is to have an accountability partner. This could be someone who also works in the same firm depending on how detailed you want your check-ins to be. If it’s someone outside your firm, ensure you are following your firm’s guidelines with what you are discussing, keep it general. You and your accountability partner can both set up reoccuring meetings to talk about progress you’ve made, milestones achieved, challenges and action plans going forward. Another tip that can help with keeping up with your plan is to come up with a timeline of the year and write exactly what you want to achieve by when.
Use the start of the new year as an opportunity to be intentional and draw out your goals. Watch as you amaze yourself with all you can accomplish when intentionality, accountability, determination and hard work are deeply held values. And remember, it’s not all about the weight of your achievements, but rather knowing we have in us the capacity to dare to visualize our dreams, devise a plan, and diligently try our very best. Don’t forget to celebrate the small victories and lessons along the way. You’ve got the brush in your hands so go on and paint.
