4. Structure and evaluate: Apply the SMART methodology to the goals you’ve jotted down. This straightforward, step-by-step process helps you adjust big objectives into small milestones. And amending your goals to meet all the SMART criteria will ensure that you’re being realistic and setting yourself up for success.
15 examples of professional goals
While your career aspirations don’t resemble anyone else’s, you can draw inspiration from common professional goals. Mix up your own goals to cover short-term, mid-, and long-term objectives that touch on different areas of your professional development, like finding the time management software that works for you, refining a technical skill, or teaching yourself a new skill.
1. Communicate with influence and impact
Whether you’re a freelancer working from home or a member of a big team that regularly makes decisions together, effective communication skills are necessary to push your work forward. No one works in a vacuum — being able to advocate your vision and convince others to follow your lead is the difference between professional success and stagnation.
Communicating with influence and impact can be either a short-term or long-term goal, depending on your aspirations. If you want to be taken more seriously, this might mean practicing spoken and written communication that conveys confidence. And if a leadership role is what you have your eye on, learning public speaking and presentation skills can help get you there.
2. Develop executive presence
You don’t have to aspire to become a manager or C-suite leader to develop an executive presence. Leadership encapsulates several valuable professional soft skills, such as self-confidence, emotional intelligence, and decisiveness. While it will push you out of your comfort zone, developing an executive presence will show managers and colleagues they can turn to you for support.
3. Effectively manage through conflict
We’re all human, capable of disagreeing or making mistakes in and out of work. And while you can’t eliminate all conflicts in the workplace, you can learn to approach them productively. High-functioning teams know how to work through conflict, moving past differences of opinion and unique communication styles.
Developing new skills like empathy, flexibility, and active listening can help you transform conflict into learning opportunities instead of stress points. It’ll help you keep your eye on the final objectives instead of getting stuck on the challenges that’ll naturally arise, improving teamwork and morale.
4. Provide effective feedback to others
Negative experiences tend to stick in people’s minds. This is called a negativity bias, a cognitive bias that causes you to focus more heavily on negative stimuli than positive ones. This is part of why exchanging feedback is so emotionally charged, even when it’s constructive — it’s easy to focus on mistakes and forget high points.
Giving good feedback is a careful balance of pointing out what went wrong with a positive spin. It’s timely, specific, and doesn’t hark solely on the negative, including examples of what went right and how to improve in the future. Above all, it’s sensitive and supportive, making the other person feel empowered to try again (and again).
5. Confidently navigate uncertainty
It’s natural to seek out the comfort of stability, but learning to embrace change as a natural part of life (in and outside of your profession) can help you be more resilient and positive when faced with unexpected challenges.
Setting a goal to build a regular journaling, meditation, or mindfulness habit can help you develop a deeper relationship with your inner self. Try asking yourself what you have control of, what you can influence, and what’s outside your sphere of influence. Focusing your energy on these questions in everyday circ*mstances can make it easier to turn to your chosen method in moments of uncertainty or stress.
6. Adopt better time management skills
If there’s one professional skill everyone can benefit from learning, it’s time management. Strong time management skills help you and the people who work with you. They allow you to take control of your calendar, focus on priorities, and build the work-life balance that makes sense to you. Time management also helps your team, assuring them that you don’t require micromanagement to follow through on your commitments.
Everyone responds to different methods of time management. Try experimenting with popular approaches, like time blocking, productivity apps, or the Pomodoro Technique, to find yours. Whatever technique you choose, new time management skills will help you prioritize, delegate, and communicate your limits to better collaborate with others.
7. Develop inclusive leadership and teams
Effective teams openly embrace diversity, making everyone feel comfortable and welcome to share their ideas and points of view. Through this knowledge sharing, teams are enriched with new perspectives and new ways of working.
Fostering inclusivity and belonging within your team and the larger organization may sound like a hard goal to break down into concrete objectives. But you can practice inclusive leadership skills every day, making a conscious effort to encourage team members to speak up, practice emotional intelligence, and always collaborate from a place of respect.
8. Complete a professional certificate or degree
Embracing continuous learning represents more than personal growth. It’s a testament to your dedication, adaptability, and professional curiosity, standout soft skills that give you a competitive edge in the job market.
Suppose you’re not eyeing a specific online course or program. In that case, you can do a skill analysis to identify your skills gap, seek guidance from your manager, or attend industry events to look for future opportunities.
Depending on your resources and final objectives, this could be a short-term or long-term goal. Think carefully about whether you can improve your skills and broaden your perspective through an opportunity like a remote course, certification program, or master’s degree.
9. Expand your professional network
Your career growth is as much about what you know as who you know. A strong network of professional colleagues allows you to self-promote your know-how and expertise, which can broaden your horizons.
Putting yourself out there doesn’t have to mean hitting all the local professional mixers. If you identify as an introvert, you can widen your network by building a personal brand on LinkedIn and other professional social media. If you prefer more in-person exchanges, networking events, conferences, and workshops are great ways to meet and learn from others in your industry.
Whatever you’re most comfortable with, build a networking plan with specific mandates, like posting three times a week on LinkedIn or scheduling a monthly informational interview.
10. Volunteer to learn new technology
Keeping up with the times is never a bad idea, especially when it comes to new technology and applications.
Digitization, automation, and AI are constantly evolving, and learning how tech could impact your job role and industry is a great way to upskill and differentiate your strengths as an employee. Apply the knowledge you learn to support your team, improve your organization’s productivity, or prepare for new career opportunities.
11. Build stronger working relationships
Workplace friendships provide more than watercooler (or Slack) conversation. They can make you feel a deeper sense of belonging and overall happiness at work, translating to deeper engagement with your team and better productivity.
If you already have good work relationships, set a goal to strengthen them. You can thank a coworker for their help on a project, offer assistance on a challenging task, or strike up a conversation with deep questions.
And don’t just focus on existing friendships — branch out. Try something new, like scheduling a virtual coffee chat with team members in a different department or spending the beginning of a 1:1 getting to know more about your supervisor.
12. Develop your peers
Peer coaching and mentorship boost confidence, build trust, and increase technical aptitude for everyone involved. And establishing a strong coaching culture helps the larger organization thrive and boosts intellectual capital. Likewise, teaching your skills helps you fine-tune your communication, prompting you to translate technical concepts or soft skills into actionable advice.
Reach out to your manager and ask how you can share your knowledge with the team, whether that’s giving a presentation at a meeting, letting an intern shadow you, or volunteering to onboard a new employee.
13. Improve your storytelling abilities
A good story goes a long way. Adding an emotional punch to a sales pitch, team presentation, or interview response can engage your audience and rally them around your idea. While storytelling is a soft skill that comes more easily to some, you can still learn and practice common tactics like creating a narrative arc or aligning your non-verbal communication (including posture, hand gestures, and eye contact) with your words.
Improving your storytelling is a goal you can work on each day by being more deliberate with your communication. You could intentionally prepare presentations, emails, and memos to be more engaging or practice being more present in your conversations with coworkers.
14. Be intentional with self-care
With so many things on your to-do list, it’s easy to put your personal goals and work-life balance at the bottom. But you can’t show up to work if you don’t care for your mental, emotional, and physical health.
Self-care means creating routines that prioritize self-love and appreciation of your whole self. But how you practice self-care is entirely up to you.
Start by identifying your biggest needs, like fixing your sleep schedule, boosting your self-worth, or making more room for more free time. Once you’ve identified areas for improvement, build a self-care checklist with daily, weekly, and monthly objectives.
Self-care is a lifelong commitment, so don’t feel you have to tackle everything at once. Start small, and step-by-step, you’ll feel empowered to nurture a better version of yourself.
15. Develop your project management skills
It’s never a bad idea to improve your organizational skills. Staying on deadline, prioritizing workloads, and properly communicating workflows are sought-after skills because they help you and your team stay on track. And even if you’re a skilled project manager, you can always adopt a new work productivity tool to improve your technical expertise.
