What are Long-Term Goals for Your Career and Why You Should Set Them

If you’re focused on achieving your highest potential, you need to set long-term goals for your career. In any situation, goal-setting gives you clarity and direction, which helps you stay focused. In career planning and strategy, however, goals are the critical piece in helping you achieve personal fulfillment, income and impact, all at once.

Many people assume that if you set a goal, you have to achieve it to be successful, and this is particularly true of short-term goals. But long-term goals work a little differently. Think of your long-term goals as a North Star, providing direction. Rather than trying to achieve them literally, longer-term goals give you a vision of success to aim for, and guidance when you run into obstacles (and opportunity) along the way.

Long-term goals for your career also help you measure your progress over time. When you take the time to check in on your progress you can look back at a previously documented goal and immediately know how on- or off-track you are. These check-in points are also the best time to adjust your goals to the life you’re actually living, which is all-too-often less than the ideal you’d planned for when you first set your goals.

Photo by Lili Popper

Creating an Actionable Plan for Achieving Long-Term Goals for Your Career

Achieving your long-term career goals requires a deep understanding of success. What does success look like—and feel like—for you? Next year? In five years?

It is these deeper intentions that describe success, which make success emotionally and intellectually clear to you, which give goals life and which make it clear which actions will help you achieve them. Intentions allow you to break down complex goals into achievable tasks, enabling you to track your progress and stay motivated. 

Regular check-ins on your goals and intentions also helps you to focus on specific steps that move you closer to your desired future, and build in opportunities to check-in and course correct along the way. This makes you feel accomplished, building your confidence, and helps you stay turned towards your North Star.

Set your long-term career goals and intentions using the following four steps:

1. Identify one specific vision of success in your worklife (your North Star)
2. Write down all ways that achieving this goal will make you feel purposeful and bring meaning to your life (hint: incorporate your values)
3. Set a timeline for achieving this goal – how long you plan to work toward it, and how quickly you will accomplish it after setting it as your North Star
4. Schedule check-in points on your calendar to evaluate your progress, adjust your strategy and even the goal itself, to help you stay on track

Should You Create Goals That Make You Happy or Make You Rich?

Setting goals is an essential part of life and it can be difficult to decide whether to focus on goals that make you happy or make you money. On one hand, achieving goals that make you happy can bring a sense of meaning and well-being. On the other hand, achieving goals that make you money can help create wealth and security. So, how do we decide which type of goal should take priority?

I recommend that you try to set one goal that can help you achieve both fulfillment and prosperity. Prosperity means different things to different people, but in general, it means having the resources you need to be healthy and happy. So you can see how these goals go hand in hand. If you have a meaningful career that supports your desired lifestyle as your goal, you’re going to be more motivated to achieve it.

However, if you elevate financial wealth to the most important goal, you’re less likely to be able to achieve both. Why? Because you’ll be more likely to choose career paths that promise great wealth but are not meaningful enough to motivate you to overcome the inevitable challenges. Work is work after all, and you have to be doing something that matters to you to make it all that work worth it.

Developing the Skills & Knowledge Necessary to Reach Your Career Objectives

Achieving career success is more than just having a job. It requires that you grow and change because of the jobs you have, qualifying you to do ever more interesting work in the future. To achieve this, you can start by creating a professional development plan. Professional development happens when you have a learning mindset and work consistently and intentionally to develop new skills and capabilities in your stretch zone. 

Building skills and abilities in your stretch zone means that you have to be aware of what is in your comfort zone, your stretch zone and your panic zone (where you’re truly in over your head). The goal is to always balance your energy between your comfort and stretch zones. As you learn more, and gain confidence in new skills in your stretch zone, you’ll naturally expand your comfort zone. Eventually you’ll find things from your panic zone looking a little less scary and they’ll begin migrating into your stretch zone.

How can you identify what skills to put into your skill development plan and then into your stretch zone? Start by looking at your long-term goals for your career and imagining you have achieved them. Ask yourself, “What will I be capable of doing when I’ve achieved my goals, which I haven’t yet mastered?” If you need to do some research to come up with a complete list, do it. 

• Look at people who hold that job on LinkedIn and see what they list as their skills. 
• Look at job descriptions for these jobs and extract the job requirements you don’t meet. 
• Ask people in your network for advice on what skills you should focus on developing. 

This will help you develop a desired job skills list for yourself. Now rank your desired job skills according to which ones you can easily master today, and which might need to wait.

Here’s how to stay in your stretch zone on the ones you can master today:

1. Inventory your skills and capabilities in your comfort zone (this means both hard/technical and soft/people skills)
2. Identify new abilities you must master, and can master now, in order to achieve your career objectives
3. Choose 1-2 of these new skills to develop in your stretch zone and ask for help if you need it to getting set up to practice these new skills 
4. Give yourself a deadline and focus on building these skills by that time. Be sure to come back and reflect on your progress regularly, and definitely once you reach your deadline.
5. As you move skills and capabilities from your stretch zone to your comfort zone choose new areas to grow and learn in (only focus on learning 1-2 new skills at a time)

Never stop learning!

By taking the time to evaluate your current skill set and understand what additional skills are required for success, you can build an effective professional development plan that will help you reach your goals while keeping yourself within a healthy stretch zone. Why be always learning in your stretch zone? Because with the world changing so rapidly, you must ensure that you are always one step ahead of your competition.

Strategies for Overcoming Barriers to Achieving Long-Term Goals for Your Career

Achieving your long-term career goals can seem daunting and overwhelming. However, with the right strategies and mindset, you can overcome all kinds of barriers to your success. Let’s take a look at the most common forms of resistance you’re likely to encounter when you start developing your career with greater intention and focus.

• High Expectations – The approach I outline above is powered by an exciting vision of your future, which should light you up and boost your confidence. But if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself very disappointed when tomorrow arrives and you’re back where you started because goals designed to be achieved five years out don’t happen overnight. The trick here is to maintain your high expectations but cultivate a mindset of learning and celebrating incremental progress. You do this through regular reflection and giving yourself credit for both your incremental successes and your lessons learned from failures and setbacks. When you recover from a setback and succeed, this will build your confidence and help you weather disappointments, large and small.
• Procrastination and Time Management – If you’re like most of us, it’s all too easy to get stuck in day-to-day weed whacking and get lost there. Getting lost in the weeds makes even short-term goals hard to focus on, much less longer term goals. Regardless of how short or long-term your goals are, it’s a good idea to set up both daily and weekly check-ins on your status. In each check in, take a look back to celebrate what you accomplished, and then rewrite your list of goals for the future. This allows you to adjust the list, and your priorities, dynamically. Here’s the key for staying focused on long-term goals for your career: have two different to-do lists—one for short term/tactical goals and another for long-term strategic goals. Check-in on your tactical goals daily and your strategic goals weekly and monthly. This will give you a healthy perspective for allocating your time and energy appropriately.
• Lack of Direction – Sometimes long-term planning can make you feel like you’re in an echo chamber, talking to yourself. It can get old and boring fast. So get some outside help and invite mentors, coaches and career buddies into your long-term goal checkins. Coaches, in particular, can help you articulate a vision of success so meaningful and exciting (to you) that it pulls you past the natural proclivity to get lost in the weeds. Coaches can also help you stay accountable to your goals to research more about the skills and create other career assets (e.g., certifications, connections etc.) you’ll need to stay motivated and make the incremental progress you need for a truly inspiring long term goal.

With these strategies in place, you will be well on your way to achieving long-term goals for your career.

How to Monitor & Adjust Your Long-Term Career Plan as You Progress

As I mentioned above, it is important to take time to regularly reflect on your goals and make adjustments as needed. This helps with both motivation and direction. Here’s a short guide to reflecting on your goals:

1. Look back since your last reflection: What went well? What went poorly? What have you achieved and accomplished? What have you learned?
2. Look forward: What challenges do you have coming up? What do you envision success looks like for these growth opportunities? What will you do to prepare?
3. Schedule the date for your next reflection: I recommend you do this at least once a quarter, if not once a month

Having a mentor or coach can also be invaluable when it comes to staying on track and achieving success. With their expertise and experience, mentors and coaches can provide personalized guidance and help you identify areas and strategies to accelerate your development. Furthermore, having someone to offer support, advice, and accountability can make all the difference when it comes to achieving ambitious long term career goals. It’s surprising how much more quickly you can evolve your own thinking in dialog with someone else skilled and motivated to help you. Who do you have on your team?