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Let’s talk about goal setting! Your professional life can provide you with great insight and can help mold your career goals. Taking just a bit of time to reflect on the experience and knowledge you hope to gain can have huge benefits toward your professional and personal success.

All too often people feel as if their job is something that happens to them rather than something they have the ability to influence and mold.

You can take a proactive role in ensuring you have a successful professional experience whether you are an intern, new to a job or have been on the job for many years. First, you need to meet your employer’s expectations and perform the agreed upon job responsibilities (see my last article regarding expectation management: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-drivers-seat-your-professional-success-management-erin-glaser/). 

Once you have established your professional credibility (more to come on that in another article) by meeting your employer’s expectations, it is professionally appropriate to advocate for your own goals.

In a study conducted by Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California they studied the most effective goal setting strategies.

Based on the conclusions from that study I have developed 4 critical steps in establishing and accomplishing your professional goals.

Professional Goal Setting:

1. What are your outcome goals for this job? Write down the long term goal(s) and then write down what needs to happen on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to accomplish those goals. Be specific in terms of what, how and when.
2. Keep your goals visible in a place you will see them daily. This will help you keep on track and update them, as needed.
3. Share your goals with your supervisor and see how you can work together towards accomplishing those goals.
4. Send your supervisor weekly progress reports regarding both your goals and the tasks they have assigned to you. This will allow you the opportunity to reflect on your progress and ask for additional help, as needed.

Practice to Action:

Long Term Goal: I want to gain teaching and leadership experience by training new employees on policies, protocols and company procedures. Short Term Goal: This week, I will identify current training programs and workshops at my company. I will identify which programs I am currently able to train new employees on. I will identify where there may be gaps in training and write down suggestions for improvement. Next week, I will meet with my supervisor to discuss my ideas and opportunities for me to take on some of the training responsibilities. Based on our conversation, I will write down an action plan for how to follow through on this and share a summary with my supervisor in order to gain buy-in.

Happy goal setting! I look forward to hearing how you use goal setting to build your professional self-advocacy skills and mold the professional experience of your dreams.