Benefits Of Setting Career Goals
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Benefits of Setting Career Goals
page. This web site is about setting and achieving personal goals. To see more goals articles please go to our achieve your personal goals or setting goals pages.
In his Seven Habits book, Stephen Covey uses a graphic example to explain the danger of failing to set goals. Imagine that your career is like climbing a ladder. As you make progress from job to job, so you will climb another rung in the ladder - until you reach the top. When you get there you will be able to take a look around. Will you like the view - or will you wish that you had done something completely different with your life? Will you wish that you had leaned your ladder against a different wall?. So the benefits of setting career goals fall into two categories. First, there is the decision where to place your ladder. What sort of work do you want to do? Clearly the benefit of choosing work that you find fulfilling should make your life more enjoyable. Unless you want to live life 'by accident', you will need to decide what's important to you before you choose your career path. How much money do you want to make? Do you prefer practical tasks or thinking work? Would you like to work mainly with people or machines? Second, you need to set goals for climbing the ladder. Remember though that this ladder is one that you will design. How high do you want to progress in your chosen career? What is your plan for achieving this? These goals will be shorter term as you aim to move from one rung to the next. The benefit here is that setting goals should increase your chances of success. One of the key reasons that goals work to your advantage is that your subconscious mind tries to achieve clear goals that you set. You can read about this in Dr Maxwell Maltz's classic book Psychocybernetics, and in my web site article on the part of your brain called the reticular activating system. In his book What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School, Mark McCormack recounted a study undertaken at Harvard between 1979 and 1989. This study showed the benefits of setting career goals - the financial benefits at least. 84% of the 1979 Harvard MBA class has set no career goals. 13% had set goals but not in writing. Neverthess, the '13% students' were earning twice as much as the '84% students' by 1989. The final 3% of students had clear written career goals in 1979. Astonishingly, these 3% earned ten times as much as the other 97% combined. In my view, financial success is well worth striving for. In itself, however, money will not bring you happiness. The key benefits of setting career goals are likely to be the knowledge that you are seeking to live the life you want, and the confidence that when you've climbed your ladder you won't regret your career decisions.
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benefits of setting career goals
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