You bought the planner. You did the vision board. You downloaded the fun tech platform. You set your goals for this year. But now what?!
If you are like a lot of us, you do a ton of work upfront to have a kick ass year. But then life starts to happen, work gets busy, you lose the momentum as the year progresses. We have all been there. Often we get stuck because we don’t know where to start or we try to take too big a leap at the beginning.
So let’s take a step back and look at some common career goals people have and a couple of first steps you can take to got on a path to achieve them!
🎇 Do I stay at my current company or look somewhere else? Often people ask this question when they are feeling stagnant, after a lot of change or when they worry they are missing out on other opportunities. But how do you know? Over the next two weeks track how you feel and why you feel that way. If you feel excited about something, frustrated by a situation or just meh. Whatever you feel throughout the day and weeks, write it down. And more importantly what caused you to feel that way! Very quickly you will see themes start to emerge that will help you start to figure out what to consider next.
🎇 I want to find a new job but I’m stuck in getting started. A good job search is about strategy, structure, and relationships. So start by getting clear about what you what in roles you are targeting, what’s important to you next?! Then you want to make sure you create a way to stay organized and structured around your search (tip: we have a great Progress Tracker we use with our clients!) Then start leveraging and activating your network. Most likely your next job is going to be found with the help of something in your atmosphere! When you combine clear goals, organization, and networking, you set yourself up for a faster, more effective, and less stressful job search.
🎇 I am ready to get a promotion (or new internal role). It’s time to leverage your internal network! Talk to your manager about your goals (if they don’t already know) and put together an actionable plan to help you take that next step. Who else is a champion at your company that can help advocate for you and make sure you are stepping in to the spotlight with your work? Finally, start building relationships with people you will be working with in the new role, you can learn a lot from them and the kind of work you will be doing. And don’t forget your HR partner who can talk to you about how your company approaches internal job changes!
🎇 I want to be a great manager. Thank you for recognizing this is a whole different skill set and one of the most important roles in an organization! You will see a theme in all of these actions….ask the humans! Talk to your team. Ask them what is going well, what adjustments do you need to make as their manager, what are they excited about, where are they getting stuck, anything to help understand how you can best support them. You can work with your manager, a mentor or a coach to help put together a plan to address the feedback and ideas.
🎇 I want to start off strong in my new role. Congrats, you got a new job. That is just step one! You want to make sure you are focused on the right things. Work with your manager to identify 3 projects, goals or metrics that will define success in your first 90 days. There are always a million things you can do, so this will help you make sure you are doing the things that will have the most impact. Then meet with your key partners about how best to work with them on these 3 projects and put together an action plan of how you will hit those targets. Don’t work in a silo (ever but especially in the beginning), discuss your progress, wins, and blockers and ask for feedback with your manager along the way.
🎇 What if I don’t know or I just want to keep growing? That is ok too! A lot of times your year is just about keeping your head above water or just naturally moving along in your career. Surviving instead of thriving. Taking a breath versus always pushing. That is a goal too. So if that is your year, or if you aren’t sure what you want to focus on, that’s your goal. To just navigate each day as it comes. To stay open to ideas and possibilities. To take breaks. To try something new in your routine. To just be. Those are important goals too.
We talked about all of this and more in our recent workshop, What Do You Need to Do To Achieve Your 2025 Career Goals, you can catch clips from the workshop on our YouTube Channel to hear more about how you can achieve your career goals this year and not just have them sitting on a piece of paper!