Goals

Goals are meant to help you visualize what you want to become, achieve, or acquire in the future.

For goals to be successful, they need to be supported by systems of behavior. This is why, within Career Minder, you can associate your experience with goals in order to see whether or not you are actually working towards them on a regular basis.

There are lots of different philosophies about how to set goals, how often you should revisit them, how specific they should be, etc. If you have not had success in setting and achieving goals in the past, there are many resources online to help, including frameworks, workshops, and even journals.

To create a goal log in to Career Minder and then select the Goals tab from the navigation bar. From there, enter the details about your goals, including a description of your goal in detail and when you would like to have completed it.

Your goals can be as specific as the next promotion or role you hope to gain, or as ambitious as where you want to be in 5 years. You can create multiple goals, tailored to different aspects of your career. For example you could have a skills related goal, an achievement related goal, and a financial goal.

Now that you have goals created it’s time to associate them with what you do day to day, your work experience. When you create experience and fill out its details you can pick the goal to which it is most applicable.

By associating your work experience with your goals you are better able to see how your day to day work lines up with what you want long term. You can see all the associated experience for each goal, by clicking the See Related Experience button for goal in the Goals tab.

Reviews offer a good opportunity to review your progress towards your goals. You can create Reviews to coincide with your performance reviews at work, for job interviews, or just to have regular check-ins with yourself.

When you create a Review it will see how much of your experience from the relevant time period relates to your different goals. Click on the trends tab to see how your work is actually relating to your goals. If little of your experience is actually connected to the goals you have set, then it may be time to revisit them.

• If you have this disconnect, but are happy with the state of your career, then it may be time to make new goals that more closely align with what you actually want.
• If your goal is still something you want to shape your work around, but your experience is disconnected then you may need to start thinking about how to better align your career with your goals.

Reviews are a great opportunity to align your goals with what you are doing day to do or vice versa.