Welcome to the new year! What a perfect time to reinvigorate your career and work life. So perfect, in fact, I’m devoting the month of January to five very common problems faced by my career counseling clients:
- not having a master plan to guide career decisions for the year
- conducting a reflexive, almost perpetual job search
- being overrun by their boss or their business, to the point of being abused by others
- feeling beaten down or uninspired by their careers or work lives
- not being connected with others professionally; having no network and no mentors
If these sound like challenges you’ve been facing, stay tuned for advice to help you. I’m framing each topic as a resolution, to keep the focus on moving forward. We start the series this week with Career Resolution 1: Identify career goals to pursue this year.
Before I present two of the easiest processes for identifying career goals, it’s helpful to review the benefits of having a master plan for the year.
Probably the strongest reason for setting annual goals is to ensure forward movement for your career. It’s not that unplanned careers don’t move forward; but careers with no guiding plan tend to move according to the strongest momentary influence. That’s one way people end up mired in jobs or projects that suit their bosses but not themselves.
Another reason to set annual career goals is to leverage the rhythms of your work. If your summer tends to be very busy, for example, you can frontload your goals for the first half of the year. Likewise, if you need your boss’s financial support for a goal, you can time your request to meet the budget cycle.
And still one more advantage of setting a plan is that without one, your resolutions are more likely to lose steam before the first crocus pushes through the snow. It’s better to keep some momentum all through the year than it is to start strong but give up entirely halfway through.
Ready to set some goals for the year? The first process I mentioned is extremely simple. Just jot notes to answer these questions for yourself:
1. By next Jan. 1, where do I want to be working? In what job title? Location?
2. What do I want to achieve this year, in terms of projects to work on, or other work goals?
3. What do I want to have learned?
Don’t feel limited to these questions, as they’re just meant to get your thinking started. The object is to let you imagine the outcome of a successful year, and then work backward to identify some of the steps you would need to take.
The final stage of the exercise is to assign tasks to dates on the calendar. For example, a welder who wants to move into management might reason that night classes in supervision will be important. Marking a January date for researching available classes and another date to meet with the boss to request funding for the classes will help ensure that this training becomes a reality.
Here’s another process to try as you identify career goals for the year. Simply select at least four items from the following checklist, then assign one to each quarter of the year. Again, you’ll need to do the next level of planning and schedule the necessary steps.
- Build connections by attending the meetings for at least one professional association.
- Identify a skill or knowledge needed to perform better at work; find a class or tutor to make this possible.
- Read more to better understand potential career moves in the field; sign up for online publications to make this a regular practice.
- Identify someone in the field to contact for occasional advice. Use this person's help to strategize stepping stones for building a career path.
- Organize accomplishments in a portfolio or as samples to make it easier to demonstrate strengths to current and future employers.
- Review the unsatisfying parts of the current job, then "fix" something by delegating, asking for reassignment, or learning better processes.
- Improve professional branding to demonstrate skills and strengths more clearly: Update the resume, create a project list, put up a LinkedIn profile, etc.
- Explore the option of changing careers by taking a class in this process or by meeting with a career counselor to customize an exploration process.
And there you have it: Two processes for identifying work goals, three reasons to do it, and five weeks of resolutions to help you improve your career this year. Next week we’ll jump in on Resolution Number 2: Let go of unstrategized job search processes.
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