What do you want to get out of your career?
The answer usually isn’t just “an income.”
We all have dreams of what we’d like to accomplish in our professional life.
Some people imagine being at the head of a business, leading the rest of the team to success.
Others just want a job where they feel like they’re making a difference.
One of the best ways to make your dreams a reality is to set effective goals.
Setting realistic executive career goals is how you visualize your target and come up with a solution to help you reach them.
While there’s no guarantee that your career path will always go off without a hitch, a goal will at least keep you pointed in the right direction.
The key to successful goal setting is ensuring that they’re clear, realistic, and achievable.
Consider these top tips for establishing successful targets.
Start With A Clear Goal
First, exactly what do you want to achieve?
It’s not enough to just say “I want to be the boss.”
Do you want to be the CEO of a corporation, the manager of your own team, or the head of your entire business?
Get to the crux of what you really want and be as specific as possible.
Studies show that we’re more likely to succeed in our goals when we make them clear.
If you’re not sure where to begin, ask yourself what your ideal job would allow you to do each day.
Think about what kind of tasks you like and hate in your current job.
It might even be a good idea to look up some information on the careers you’ve considered pursuing before.
This will help you to see what kind of day-to-day tasks and leadership skills are required for each position.
Be Realistically Ambitious
The more ambition you have, the better. However, it would help if you still were somewhat realistic.
For example, if you’re still in your first year of your accounting degree, but your goal is to become the CFO of Microsoft by the end of the year, you’re probably not going to achieve your personal development target.
Setting yourself up to fail with a goal you can’t achieve is another way of ensuring that you never go anywhere.
Unfortunately, this also means that your goal can’t be to just make a lot of money without doing any work.
It’s important to take the time to think about the leadership skills you have, the things you enjoy, and the talents you can use to actually make an income.
For instance, if you love working in your marketing role now, but you think you could do more, perhaps you could aim to become a manager of a marketing department, or the owner of your marketing company within the next 5-10 years.
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executive career goals / goal setting / leadership skills
