One of the hardest interview questions to answer, yet one of the most common, is “where do you see yourself in five years?” You may have a pre-planned response that is directly aligned with the job you are interviewing for so you can assure your future employer that you will be a loyal and dedicated employee, but this question causes a bit of self-reflection and soul-searching. Setting career goals helps you navigate this ambiguity, leads you down a path that allows for growth and continuous learning, and ultimately helps you realize your career. Remember, a career isn’t your dream job, it’s what you’ve learned and accomplished along your professional journey.
Think about embarking on a cross-country road trip from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. You can either download enough podcasts and drink enough coffee to keep you awake for the long days ahead behind the steering wheel of your car, or you can plan to stop in some of the nation’s greatest cities, witness the most beautiful landscapes and landmarks the country has to offer, and maybe even meet new or old friends who live somewhere along the way, while experiencing new cultures. Both of these paths will get you to your destination, but achieving these milestones along the way will be more fulfilling and help you stay motivated to reach your goal.
Setting clear objectives, or milestones, allows for short-term successes and can keep you motivated while striving towards a goal. You may have a career goal that you want to achieve this year or over the next five years but without setting clear objectives, you may struggle to hold yourself accountable. It’s up to you to own your career, and setting career objectives is a mechanism to keep you on track to realize your goals.
Now that you have your career goals defined and you’ve set your objectives, it’s time to get to work! You need to have a vision of what it feels like live your career goal or a vision of you achieving your first objective. How do you feel in that moment? Do you feel accomplished? Do you feel like you’ve realized your full potential? Do you feel like you have a deeper understanding of the bigger picture?
Keep those feelings in mind as you’re working towards your goal. Envision yourself achieving it and how you feel in that moment. This type of focus can help you avoid distractions that will inevitably be placed in your way as you’re working towards your career goals.
Having clear career goals and objectives also helps you manage your time more efficiently. Think about a day when you have an early morning meeting, a training course scheduled for the afternoon, and you need to leave work right on time so that you aren’t late for dinner plans that you’ve already had to reschedule twice. This means that the time you have available to work towards your objectives is limited and that you need to stay focused and be conscious about how you use that valuable time in your day to keep you progressing toward your goals.
Time management is not easy, and it’s something that we all have struggled with at some point in time. There are many resources available to help you develop and improve this skill. Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time is a highly rated book that outlines simple and actionable ways you can begin to take control of your time and realize your goals.
Give it a try. Set a small goal for yourself, whether it be in your career or your personal life. This could be a paper that you need to write, a monthly budget goal that you would like to meet, or a new skill that you would like to develop. Imagine yourself achieving that goal. Work backwards to create a few objectives, or milestones, that you will need to reach along the way and consciously work towards them over the upcoming weeks or months. If you get stuck, refer back to this article or reflect on the progress you’ve made and acknowledge the small successes.
