Your Career Development Action Planning Being able to reflect, set goals and create action plans is essential for effective personal development throughout your career – the graphic below is an example of a continuing professional development cycle. Goal setting Setting goals is a crucial aspect of effective career development. However, many people lose motivation quickly because they don’t know how to set goals, because, for example, their goal may be too vague; it may be overly ambitious or perhaps too many goals have been set. Effective goal setting is a hallmark of successful people across business, sport and many other areas. Take elite level sports people, for example. Success is rarely guaranteed by natural talent alone, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a plan and system. They will regularly set and review small process goals in order to reach their overall objective. This allows continous performance improvement incrementally. This approach plus a positive mindset and a clear commitment to the goal is a hallmark of successful athletes. This strategy is applicable to your career development too! SMART goal setting Thankfully, there is a tried and tested technique you can apply to help you commit, stay motivated and work towards your goal, it’s called the SMART model. Examples of goals could include (but are not limited to) developing a new skill seeking relevant work experience deciding to apply to relevant internships finding out more about the sector / profession you might want to work in The key is that your goal should be personally meaningful to you. Remember – you may have a large overall objective such as getting your dream job – but you may have to make a series of smaller goals to enable you to get there. Now back to the SMART model which is an effective way to approach goal setting systematically. Perhaps, you have already heard of SMART? If not see the image below and view the video for a quick overview of what SMART stands for. Set your own SMART goal! Now you have seen how you can effectively structure the goal setting process why not set yourself some key goals for the next steps in your career? To help – download this sheet with an example of SMART goals and a template for structuring your own goals. SMART GOALS WORKSHEET Once you have set yourself goals feel free to get in touch with the Careers Service and we would be happy to work with you on your action plans for the future!
