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Vol. 1 No.100 May, 2014
out about different careers are attending professional and trade shows, participating in job fairs, visiting company websites, and keep an eye on how companies are talked about in the press, volunteering, or working part time and/or seasonally in the industry. Question 3: How do I get hired? Understanding your long-term vision is fundamental for career planning. From the vision you can write down the steps required to take in order to get where you want to be. Make sure your goals are SMART and have a contingency plan in case things will not go the way you expected. The more contingency plans you have the more likely you will be able to survive the inevitable setbacks. You will also have much more confidence in yourself despite the difficulties you face during the journey. Setting SMART Goals -What and Why? You may have heard about SMART goal setting. SMART stands for goals that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-framed. Why is it important to set SMART goals? The process of setting goals and targets allows you to choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know what you have to concentrate on, and what is merely a distraction. This process of goal setting is a standard technique used by toplevel athletes, successful businesspeople, and achievers in all fields. It gives you longterm vision, and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your resources. By setting sharp, clearly defined (that is, SMART) goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. The process of setting goals, achieving them, and seeing this achievement gives you confidence that you will be able to achieve higher and more difficult goals. Setting Life Goals helps people bring their future into the present by giving them a clearer view of what their ideal future looks like. Established goals help you retain perspective, focus efforts, establish priorities, provide motivation and encourage achievement. You need both long, medium and shortterm goals. Start with the long term ones -where you want to be in your life, for example, in 5-10 years’ time. To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some of these categories (or in categories of your own, where these are important to you): Artistic: Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what? Attitude: Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? If so, set a goal to improve your behaviour or find
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a solution to the problem. Career: What level do you want to reach in your career? Education: Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to achieve other goals? Family: Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family? Financial: How much do you want to earn by what stage? Physical: Are there any athletic goals you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this? Pleasure: How do you want to enjoy yourself? – you should ensure that some of your life is for you! Public service: Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how? After setting the long-term goals you need to break it down to smaller, medium-term goals, and further to short-term goals. As you can see, you are using your life vision as a guide for your long-term goals and work backwards to identify the steps you need to take in your life today to get where you want to be.
required to reach your goal. To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as
Setting SMART goals -How?
Realistic
Now that you know what SMART goals are and why you must set SMART goalslet us turn our attention to how to set SMART goals that really help you get things done and take you where you want to be in your life. As a reminder, SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Framed goals.
Specific
A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions: • Who: Who is involved? • What: What do I want to accomplish? • Where: Identify a location. • When: Establish a time frame. • Which: Identify requirements and constraints. • Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal. Example: A general goal would be, “Get in shape.” But a specific goal would say, “Join a health club and workout 3 days a week over the next 3 months.” Measurable Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set. When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort
• How much? • How many?
• How will I know when it is accomplished? Achievable When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals. You can attain almost any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them. To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. Do you want to achieve this goal? Do you have the skills to achieve the goal? If not, can you acquire the skills? Do you have the necessary resources to achieve this goal? If not, can you overcome this obstacle? A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress. A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labour of love. Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal. Time-framed A goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there’s no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 5kg, when do you want to lose it by? “Someday” won’t work. But if you anchor it within a timeframe, “by the 1st of August”, then you’ve set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal.