Identify Your Career Goals

The lifelong question - "What do you want to be when you grow up?" This is a question often asked of us when we are children, but once we reach adulthood, we tend to stop evaluating our career decisions as stringently. Often, we just wake up in a career we have been in for years and seem to have little flexibility to leave. Wouldn't it be better to consciously decide what you want to accomplish in your career?

Luckily, identifying your career goals may not be as difficult as you imagine. If you simply take the time to contemplate your career decisions and your goals, the answer may very well present itself to you.

First, sit down in a quiet place with a pen and pad of paper. Write down your current age at the top left side of the page. On the top right side, write your current position; not just your job title, but your salary, financial standing, and overall position in life. Now draw a horizontal line across the page below what you have written. Down the left side of the page, write your age in five years, ten years, twenty years, all the way to retirement. Now you need to really look at your current standing. Are you happy with where you are in life at this point? If not, what do you want to change?

To evaluate and determine what your goals are, you also need to consider where you do not want to be. At retirement, do you want to be dependent on social security and family members for support? Do you want to be stuck in the same employment position you are in now for the rest of your life? Visualizing what you do not want will make what you do want clearer.

Now, look all the way at the bottom of your paper to the retirement portion. What do you want to have accomplished in your career when you retire? Write that to the right of your paper. The rest is easy. Now you need to determine what steps are necessary to reach that ultimate goal. Those incremental steps will be your five, ten, and twenty-year goals. Now evaluate each of those in correlation with the time frame given. How will you reach your five-year goal? What steps will be necessary? You will then break down your five-year goal into 6 month or 1 year steps. The more detail, the better. You want a precise roadmap to your ultimate goal.

Once you have your roadmap, you will need to track your progress. Keep a record of your goals and, as you achieve each one, mark them off. If you have a daily planner this is an ideal place to write your goals to keep them in front of you. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"; this is true for life journeys as well. Once you have completed this process you will have identified your career goals and broken them down into manageable steps, making it easier to achieve them.

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