How to achieve Career Goals (with time-bound action plan)?

Are you stuck with same job for a long time? Have you always loved being in safe zone? Do you feel stuck in rut and are thinking of starting your own hustle? If you think that you are not growing in your career, this article is going to be your eye-opener. Discover actionable tips on how to achieve your career goals and accelerate your career. (Don’t expect get-rich-quick scheme, it doesn’t work!!!!)

(Some of the links in the post are affiliate links. If you click on the link, I am entitled to affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. )

I attended a 5 day online workshop last week by Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins – Own your future challenge. There was an interesting question raised during day 2. A question that made me write this blog.

The question was “What would be your advice to 20 year old you?” That made me look back at my journey over last decades and think what is it that I would like to tell my 20 year old self. My answer was “Make a career growth plan and keep evolving. Plan, Execute and Repeat”.

I am happy where I stand today career wise. But is this the best that I could have done in last two decades? My career has been unplanned. I have taken up what came my way and made best of it. But I think if I would have planned better, had acquired skills and shown more aggression towards venturing in new challenging responsibilities, I would have grown better.

It would be win-win situation for me and my organization too. Isn’t a skilled and enthusiastic employee the best human resource for an organization?

It’s never too late to start making improvement. We cannot undo the past but we can surely improve the future. So let’s see how you can achieve your career goals in easy, actionable steps.

What are career goals?

A career goal is well defined statement about the career that you intend to profess over your lifetime. It is your destination or important milestones in terms of career. Where do you want to be after 3 years, 5 years or 15 years? If you know your destination, it is easy to plan your journey. If you have a role model or you know you want to be CEO of the company, it is easy to determine what are skills required to be in that position and to learn those skills over period of time.

As a child when anyone asked me about career, I always presumed it’s about the profession I want to pursue in my life. Only now I realize it has to be about the career role you want to reach as your highest echelon.

Why is a career goal statement important?

A career goal statement is important because it sets up long term targets for an individual to achieve. There are three important benefits of having a well-defined career goal.

1. It gives motivation to reach your Career goal. You can focus on improving yourself, learning new skill and overcoming the challenges you face as you climb up the ladder.

2. It makes you accountable. Without a career goal statement, it would not make much difference, if you are in same position and remuneration for many years. However by setting up career goal statement, you become accountable to yourself for the time passing by.

3. You achieve direction for your journey of career. You can evaluate your current position against the goals set in the statement. And make necessary changes to reach your destination in time. It is like holding a map for the journey ahead.

How to set career goals?

Career goals have to be set thoughtfully with care and caution. While setting career goals, one much ensure that they are meeting the criteria of SMART goals.

The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable Actionable, Realistic and Time-bound.

1. Specific : Be clear about what you want to achieve.

2. Measurable : Plan important milestones in your career. If you want to be CEO of the company, the milestones may be about becoming Trainee, Officer, Assistant Manager, Manager and then CEO. By keeping milestones, you will be able to measure your success over time.

3. Attainable : It is important to set realistic goals. Though dreams can be unlimited, you need to be sure about the resources available to meet your goals.

4. Relevant : Are your goals relevant for your ultimate purpose in life? Are they aligned with your passion and interest? Are you trying to achieving something just for sake of your parents or due to peer pressure? It is very important to figure out so that you shall not have burn-out in your race of career growth.

5. Time-bound: Set a time limit for each milestone. Though your entire career plan is for 20 years, break it down into milestones that are achievable in every 3-5 years.

How to achieve your career goals?

You can achieve your career goals by drawing up a practical Career growth plan, ascertaining the short term and long term career goals, making plan of action to reach those goals and reviewing them periodically.

1. Plan journey of your career (What?)

What do you want to be? Answer this question to yourself. Build a rough structure of your career and your education / skillset. Setting up this goal is most important part. It is about setting destination for your journey.

2. Know your Purpose (Why?)

Why do you want to be what you want to be? Know why you are choosing the career. Is it aligned with your passion and interest? Are you enough qualified if you have career goal in technical field? It is important to have a strong sense of ‘why’ for your career as it shall help you to be stable and focused on your journey. You can only enjoy your success truly if it is aligned with your ‘why’.

3. Choose 1-3 long term goals

What is the highest position you want to achieve? May be you would like to be CEO, HOD or manager of the company or you would like to be entrepreneur of a new company.

You may have more than 1 goal in long term. Like may be you want to start a cosmetic company and hair accessories company. Or you want to work a multinational hotel as chef and someday start with your own restaurant.

4. Break Them Down Into Simple Steps and shorter goals

Figure out what are the small steps that you can take over period of time so that you can reach your long term goals. Let’s say, for becoming CEO you will have to rise in couple of ranks in company. Each rank has different requirement of skill set. Check what are the skill sets that you already have. What are the ones that you may need to acquire?

There may be other factors that you may need to check like relocation to the place where your skills are more in demand, gathering more certification etc.

5. Evaluate your skill set

Skills are soft skills and hard skills.

Soft skills

Soft skills are transferable skills which are generic in nature. They are personal traits and are associated with every job or industry irrespective of job title.

Some of the soft skills are:

Interpersonal skills
Public Speaking skills
Communication skills
Critical thinking
Problem solving
Customer Service attitude
Teamwork Skills
Negotiation
Conflict Resolution
Leadership
Administrative skills
Management Skills

Hard skills

Hard skills are abilities that are learnt in relation to specific job through formal education or additional training. They are teachable, measurable and related to specific job. Hard skills can be domain specific and non-domain specific.

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6. Find Guidance

Guidance may be in addition to the formal education diploma / degree or additional vocational training. It can be in form of mentors or additional courses or membership to professional organizations.

Mentors or guides

Seeking mentors is the best way to learn from those who have already achieved what you strive for. So approach seniors in your industry for guidance.

It is not easy to find a mentor as successful people are often busy. But observing them, their work culture and their lifestyle closely will give you enough idea about their working process.

When you are discouraged, hopeless or at verge of giving up, a mentor or guide can support and motivate you. A mentor can also be a good accountability partner.

You can also find guidance in people who are in same stage of progress. Sharing about each other’s struggle shall help you exchange ideas and solutions which are workable as per current scenario better than experiences of mentor whose struggle was decades ago.

So connect with like-minded people who have similar goals and you can achieve clarity regarding your action and also have accountability partner.

Enroll in courses or programs

There are many programs or courses which train you particularly for the job that you intend to grow in. there are courses even for small section of the industry you are interested in or even in training of soft skills.

Some of the platforms I recommend personally are:

There are many individuals or organizations that are hosting courses on their independent website pertaining to specific topics. If you are new blogger or are interested in starting your own blog, for beginners, I would personally recommend SEO Jumpstart from Eb Gargano from Productive blogging. It gives step-by step instruction about starting and growing a blog.

Become part of professional organization / association

There are many local, national or regional memberships of professional institutions. The members of these associations or organization get access to newsletters, new updates in the field, conferences etc.

Connections with people in your field gives you leverage in your business.

Are you member of any professional organization? If not, then start with linkedin. Linkedin also hosts group of professional membership associations virtually where you can connect with people in your industry – locally as well as internationally.

7. Read about journey of other successful people

Nothing is as motivating as success stories of accomplished personalities. There is lot that we can learn from the hardships of the successful people.

Steve Jobs is known as a successful entrepreneur with innumerable innovations in Apple. Jobs became successful in his 20s when Apple rose to success. However when he was 30, Board of directors at Apple decided to fire him. Because of his relentless attitude, Jobs founded a new company NeXT which was later acquired by Apple. After rejoining Apple, Jobs went on to become one of most successful entrepreneurs in the history of business.

Did you know the script of Harry Potter by JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishing houses before being accepted by small publishing house. Only 1000 books were published as first print. We all know that Harry potter franchise became one of the most famous books followed by series of movies.

Reading about how these people overcame their problems and reached greater heights of success, motivates you to stay focused on your goals.

So read the biography of someone you admire and deep dive into lessons of his life. There is lot that you can learn from his mistakes and failures. Find inspiration and wisdom in his words, understand how he fought his struggle and found success eventually.

Here are list of biographies that you can read to be inspired:

Wings of fire : Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam

Elon Musk : Tesla, Spacex and Quest for fantastic future by Ashlee Vance

The everything store (about Jeff Bezos) by Brad Stone

Alibaba – The house that Jack Ma built by Duncan Clark

Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson

8. Build habits that take you closer to your goals

Habits maketh a man. You are what you are because of your habits. If you think you are always on time, that is because you are punctual with your routine. Or you have good physique, that is because you have habit of working out. If you are untidy or messy, may be you have not built habit of being organized.

There is very little on the earth that cannot be changed by taking corrective action. You need to identify what are your intentions and actions.

Understand what your weak areas are. What are the habits that you need to develop to become better at those weak areas? It may be setting daily or weekly routine, better time management, being more disciplined.

Build a routine, set fixed time daily for habitual thing; soon it will become part of your life. It is important to push yourself in the initial few weeks.

9. Visualize Success.

You are what you think you are. You will become what you think you want to become. If you think you are lazy, you will become lazy or remain lazy. If you think you are hardworking person, your mind will send you signals to work hard.

We are constantly feeding our sub-conscious mind knowingly or unknowingly. Let’s say, if you think working out daily is difficult and you don’t have time for it, you will keep giving this excuse to yourself every day. But if you objectively look at your last week or day, you will realize that you had 30 minutes free everyday or you could set aside 30 min from your schedule easily for exercise.

You are programming your sub-conscious mind. So program it to do what you want to really do.

Make a vision for yourself. Visualize being boss, being rich and successful. Close your eyes and imagine that you have already achieved the peak of your career goal. Focus on how you feel about that achievement. How are others’ around you responding to your achievement? See that your colleagues are supportive and are congratulating you on your success. See that how new success has changed life of your family.

Visualizing success gives rosy picture of your future to your mind. So your mind starts making a mind map of what you should do to reach there.

Don’t believe this? Start with small goal and visualize it everyday for next 3 months before you sleep. I would love to hear about your experience after 3 months.

10. Overcome mental hurdles.

Most important struggle in achieving a successful career is overcoming mental hurdle. Let us discuss some of the common mental hurdles that we face and how can we fight them.

Procrastination

Most important factor to overcome procrastination is to recognize it at the bud and snip it off. When you feel you are giving yourself an excuse postponing the action to later date, become mindful of your thoughts. Drive away your thoughts that are making you procrastinate. Feed thoughts in your mind of urgency and importance.

In the book “The 5 second rule” by Mel Robbins, she has explained one simple trick to overcome procrastination. Give yourself only 5 seconds to decide if you want to do it or not. Once the decision is made, do not allow your thoughts to wander. Stop thinking and start doing.

It works!!! My biggest struggle was to overcome procrastination and I can proudly say that this 5 second rule worked magic on me.

Fear

Fear of unknown, fear of failure, fear of being judged, fear of losing reputation holds us back. We think 100 times about doing something but are held back by fear. We all have capability to achieve success but what differentiates successful people from us is their willingness to overcome fear.

Sadly there is no simple way of fighting fear than confronting it. Face your fear, go beyond it. If you think people will judge you for your failure or for your actions, ask yourself, is it worth to let go of your dreams for sake of what others think of you.

You are responsible for your success and failure. If you accept failure as learning lesson, you may not have fear of failure anymore.

Feeling overwhelmed

When you set big goals and there are important life changing decisions that you may need to make, you may feel overwhelmed. This feeling may trigger fear.

You can overcome feeling of being overwhelmed by breaking your bigger goals in small goals or habits. Set time plan for your action. Continue doing your action for set time plan without looking back at results. Consistency yields result.

When I started blogging, I was overwhelmed as I realized it is not only about writing articles on your website. There are too many technical things that I had to learn. Managing social media is another ball game altogether. Now I have set goals with timelines about action I need to take. I do not stress myself anymore with pageviews on site or about number of followers on social media.

It has helped me to focus on writing more and better articles for site instead of feeling as failure.

Set goals for your actions and not for your results. So your goal has to be to finishing your task in time with zero errors. You can periodically review your career goals and make necessary changes to reach where you wish to.

Being perfect

While being perfect may not be a real hurdle, it becomes one eventually. If you stop looking for perfect action, perfect job, perfect result and be happy with good result, you will realize that you have undertaken many tasks with good result instead of one perfect task. It will help you finish task on time, be less overwhelming or stressful and achieve more.

11. Be focused and Track Progress

Track your progress periodically. Though I had mentioned about being more focused on doing actions than on results, it is important that periodically you review the results so that you can direct your future actions to more fruitful results.

So set your timeline for 3 months. Keep doing action for 3 months consistently. Be focused. At the end of 3 months, evaluate results. This analysis shall tell you if you are on right path. Are you improving? What more you can do? Or how you can do it better with lesser efforts or in shorter time? How do you feel about it?

Look out for 80-20% principle. Identify the 20% of efforts that are giving you 80% of results. Do more of those efforts.

12. Celebrate every small or big achievements

Without celebrations there is no meaning to struggle. Celebrate every small and big achievement. I am not talking about partying hard to celebrate. I am talking about recognizing success and patting your back for your efforts. Appreciate your friends, colleagues and family for their support in your success.

Buy yourself or your family something special as memory for achieving your milestone. Share your success or donate to charity. Nothing gives more satisfaction that helping others in need.

These celebrations not only become beautiful memories but also keep you motivated positively for your journey ahead.

Let me know in comments below about what are your career plans. How are you planning to achieve them? What is something new that you learnt in this article today?

I would absolutely love to hear from you.

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Let me know in the comments below, what would you like to improve in your self.

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We are in this together!!!