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Staying focused on your long terms goals, knowing what opportunities to pursue and what ones to avoid and using time efficiently can be a challenge for many people. These tips will help you to stay focused on and achieve your career and job search goals.

Smart Goal Setting
Smart goal setting will help you to achieve your goals and motivate you to achieve even larger accomplishments. Use these tips on goal setting to achieve your career goals.

Setting Career Goals
Setting career goals effectively can ensure that your career continues to move forward in the direction you choose. These tips will help you set and achieve your goals.

5 Ways to Achieve Your Goals
Once you've set your goals, the next step is to brainstorm ways to achieve your goals. Develop an action plan to map out the steps you will take and the resources you will need to achieve your goals.

Tips on Time Management for Job Seekers
Managing your time effectively can play a big role in your job search success. These tips will help you develop good time management methods to create the structure you need to reach your job search goals.

Pursuing Career Success on Your Own Terms
Take some time to think through your motivations for pursuing career success. If you're following someone else's dream and not really pursuing your own version of career success, then you could be setting yourself up for self sabotage.

Why Career Success is Within Your Control
Creating your future career success can take hard work, but the right mind set can help you to stay motivated. Your own beliefs about yourself can be crucial to your success in career related matters.

Transferable Skills Increase Your Job Options
Transferable skills are the skills you develop through any activity. By thinking of and marketing yourself as a set of skills that you can offer to employers, instead of just a job title, you can open up a lot of opportunities for yourself.

Feature Article

Focus on Results for Job Search Success

There are plenty of ways to search for a new job. Some job search strategies are easier than others, and some are more effective than others. Unfortunately, the easiest job search tasks (the ones people tend to want to focus on) are often not the most effective tasks.

It can be tempting to allow yourself to settle into working on certain job search strategies, such as mass mailing unsolicited resumes to random employers, or searching for advertised jobs in newspapers all day, simply because they are relatively easy and risk free tasks. Those kinds of job search strategies don't require you to really take any risks in the way that proven, but more intimidating networking strategies (like arranging informational interviews or speaking with your business contacts) do.

Unfortunately, many of the low risk job search strategies people use are not particularly effective. Mass mailing unsolicited resumes has a very low success rate compared with the amount of time and effort it takes to prepare and mail out those resumes to random employers, and advertised jobs only account for 20% of jobs available. So, although absorbing yourself in that type of low risk task may make you feel like you've been productive, when you only focus on low risk, low reward tasks, you may be busy, but you are not necessarily being productive. That is, your activities are far less likely to lead you to your desired goal (getting a great job) than they would if you required yourself to focus on job search strategies that get results.

Just because you are busy, does not mean you are actually moving toward your goal. The 80 20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, sums up this concept quite well. This principle says that 80% of unfocused effort typically creates only 20% of results. That means, if you are not actively managing your time and choosing your activities based on the results they generate, only about 20% of your time will be truly productive and help to move you toward your goals.

I'm not suggesting that you should never look in your local newspaper for job leads; you may find something there that's a great fit for you. What I am suggesting is that you should avoid making that, or any other low risk, low reward job search strategy, your primary job search activity. Do not avoid job search strategies (like networking) that are highly productive simply because they are challenging.

Using good time management methods will help you to reach your job search goals. Challenge yourself to choose your job search strategies based on the results they will get, and not based on the difficulty of the task, and you will be in a better position to make big strides toward your career goals.

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