Simplified Career Goal Setting

I met with a friend of mine earlier today – she’s a bit of a reverse mentee for me, but that’s a different story.   During our discussion, she asked my thoughts on setting career goals, and she suggested that I share my thoughts on LinkedIn as well. First a bit of context… This person is a recent MBA hire who I’ve known since she was in b-school, interned for my team before she graduated and joined my team about two years ago. Like many of us, she’s significantly smarter and more accomplished than she generally gives herself credit for and that set the stage for my feedback.

 Set Goals that Expand your Choices

Generally speaking, working toward career goals is really about creating additional opportunities for yourself and my formula doing that is pretty simple: pick a time horizon that makes sense for you, create opportunities to amplify your story, expand the number of people that you share that story with and invest in increasing your skills.   That’s not to say that you need to leave your team or change your role, but I believe that you’ll experience a new sense of freedom when you know that you are increasingly valuable and have more career choices.

 Pick A Time Horizon

Goals should be S.M.A.R.T., including being timely.    While I’ve historically thought about my career goals with a two-year time horizon in mind, the length of time doesn’t matter that much, as long as it's far enough away for you to work toward meaningful goals and close enough for you to measure progress and create some sense of urgency.    I like to start my goals by saying, “In two years, I will…”. 

 Strengthen your Brand

Investing in your brand is an essential way of telling your network what you’ve accomplished and what you care about, and LinkedIn is a pretty powerful way to articulate and communicate your brand. This doesn’t have to be overly complicated, and to some extent, you can even outsource this. I’d consider buying your friends coffee or beer to help craft your LinkedIn Headline; a well-crafted Headline is well-worth the $20. I’d follow companies and people who you admire on LinkedIn, and I’d get people to write you LinkedIn Recommendations, and I wouldn’t be shy about asking people to modify their Recommendation to call out things that help amplify your brand. 

 Expand your Network

Networking doesn’t have to be challenging and even if you don’t like “networking,” you should still be looking to expand the number of people who know what you’re capable of and can help point you toward new career opportunities. I do a few simple things: ask my existing network to make introductions (e.g. “Mike, could you introduce me to…?”) and I  take advantage of serendipitous connections (e.g. “Sally, it was good to meet you at this conference; can I connect with you on LinkedIn to find time to talk more about …?”). Lastly and somewhat less often, I reach out in the blind (e.g. “Lisa, I found you on LinkedIn and notice that you have experience in …; do you have a few moments in the next few weeks to share some of your insight with me?”). I have a long-standing goal of expanding my LinkedIn Connections by five every week. 

 Increase your Capabilities

The world is always changing and your hard skills have to keep pace with that change if you want to stay relevant. If you think about it, have to grow your skills somewhat faster than the world’s rate of change if you're going to create new opportunities for yourself. I wouldn’t overthink the new skill that you’re going to acquire since even that skill may become irrelevant or commoditized over time AND part of the value of learning a new skill is that you develop the ability to learn new skills. At the same time, I like to be sensible about the skills that I am investing in (e.g. I tend to rule out brain surgery as a new skill for myself); my approach is to take a look at job postings on LinkedIn that sound like attractive stretch opportunities and invest some of the skills that those postings call for. 

The approach that I shared with my friend is simple enough for anyone to follow, and I’m sure will help create new career opportunities in a short period of time.

 Best of luck in setting your own career goals.