Career Goal Setting

Career goal setting is an excellent way to motivate yourself and to ensure you are actively moving your life in a direction of your choice. If you set your goals well, you'll gain a sense of control over your place in the world and have an overriding set of priorities that inform your day to day decisions.

Your smart, achievable goals become the foundation for a plan that motivates you to press forward through your achievements as well as your challenges.

Achieving goals can give you a feeling of accomplishment that can inspire you to pursue even more challenging accomplishments. Alternately, when you're struggling to reach a milestone you've set for yourself, if you've framed that ambition as a well defined goal, you will be better prepared to persevere, regroup and rethink your approach until you finally accomplish the task at hand.

Setting Meaningful Goals Happens on a Variety of Levels

Lifetime or long term goals include things you want to achieve across the span of your life. Then come your medium and short term goals, which are milestones you'd like to reach in the next several years or the next several months. Finally, many people also set daily goals to keep themselves focused and working towards their larger scale goals.

In addition to spanning a variety of time frames, goals also span a variety of areas in your life. Although the focus of this site is on career planning and management, all aspects of your life are interconnected, so when you are setting career goals, it will be important to consider the things you'd like to achieve in all aspects of your life. That way you'll ensure that your career goals won't conflict with other values and goals connected with other aspects of your life.

Goals can involve your career, education, family, finances, personal development, physical fitness, community, and hobbies and interests. When you know your major priorities in a variety of areas of your life, you'll be better equipped to set meaningful, achievable goals for yourself.

Also, keep in mind that career goal setting should be somewhat flexible. Don't let yourself abandon a goal just because it's presenting some challenges. However, your values and needs will change across your lifetime, and your goals will need to evolve to reflect those changing priorities.

Career goal setting helps you to organize your time and assess your progress towards any accomplishment. Goals can challenge you to accomplish things in a set period of time. When you set your goals, you decide what is important in your life, distinguish priorities from distractions and provide a benchmark for recognizing and celebrating achievements.

---

Get inspiration and tips to achieve your goals:

Choose It! for Decision Making Confidence
Decision making confidence and smart planning will help you to gain enormous control over the direction of your career and your future. Choose It! is a free decision making software program that helps you think logically and systematically through all kinds of choices.

Achieve Goal Setting Success
Achieve your goals and lifetime success using these FREE practical tools including a step-by-step goal setting workbook, templates, personal analysis tools and action plans... not to mention, lots of information on everything you need to know about goal setting and other helpful advice on how to get the most out of your personal goal setting journey.

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.

Career Quotes
I love collecting quotes and words of wisdom. These are some of my favorite career quotes. I hope you find some inspiration here to help move you toward your goals.

Tips on Setting Goals
These tips on setting goals will get you on your way to building a career that meets your needs and interests.

What Effective Goal Setting Strategies Do You Use?

Do you have a strategy for setting effective goals? What is your strategy? Why does it work?

Share your goal setting tips here.

Enter Your Title

Share Your Goal Setting Strategy [ ? ]

Close Help Entering your story is easy to do. Just type!... Your story will appear on a Web page exactly the way you enter it here. You can wrap a word in square brackets to make it appear bold. For example [my story] would show as my story on the Web page containing your story. TIP: Since most people scan Web pages, include your best thoughts in your first paragraph.

Upload 1-4 Pictures or Graphics (optional) [ ? ]

Close Help Do you have a picture to add? Great! Click the button and find it on your computer. Then select it.

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

Click here to upload more images (optional)

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

Add a Picture/Graphic Caption (optional) 

Author Information (optional)

To receive credit as the author, enter your information below.

Your Name	(first or full name)
Your Location	(ex. City, State, Country)

Submit Your Contribution

Check box to agree to these submission guidelines.

(You can preview and edit on the next page)

Like CareerChoiceGuide.com?