Career goals

I hear a lot of times people struggling to decide if they should accept a job offer or not. “Should I accept this lower salary?, Should I accept working for this industry?, Should I accept commuting for 2 hours a day?”, Etc. I also had these struggles. But this is why a personal development plan is must-to-have in your professional life.

Because let’s face it, everyone has career goals, even though sometimes we’re not 100% conscious about them. Since we started studying a degree we have them.

But, it’s better to be conscious of them and take ownership. In the end, it’s our career. If we take ownership, it’ll become easier to choose between two job offers and find the job that you want.

How do I set these career goals?

First, you need to accept that probably these career goals will change over time. When you’re studying you have ones, then you start working and probably it’ll change a little bit. And while you’re growing into a senior position it’ll change even more. But that’s fine, in fact, it’s how it should be. It’s very difficult to have a very clear career path when you’re 18 and maintaining till you retire. There are a lot of things that you don’t know yet. Your priorities will change as well.

When I was studying, my career goal was to work as a creative in an advertising agency…. Until I actually worked at one and I realised I don’t like it. If this happens, no worries, it’s natural. The best thing you can do is to rethink your career goals and try to find a job which meets these requirements. In my case, I went freelance because after this internship I didn’t know what I wanted to do. The job offers that were available at that moment were not ideal. And as a freelancer, I had the opportunity to work on different projects. From designing brochures to conducting the user research for a new APP. This allowed me to realise what I want to do in my professional life which is working in the UX field.

Starting with the basics

One of the things you need to know is where you want to be in 5 or 10 years. Most people will tell you to think in 10 years but this is quite long for me so I always take 5. Probably you hate this because it’s the typical question companies ask you in job interviews. But it’s very essential. Without this, you can’t make any plan. You should also include personal goals/plans like: Where do you want to live? Do you want to have a family? etc. Your personal plan’ll affect your professional one and the other way around as well.

Once you have this, you should start working backwards and ask yourself 3 questions:

What do I need to learn/improve to get there?

What do you need to practice more?

What do you need to stop doing?

By asking these questions you’re already writing your career plan.

Getting deeper

Now is when you go deeper and you define :

What are your values? What do you believe in? What’s important to you. And this matters because you should choose a company which mission, vision and values are aligned to yours. Because working in a company with the opposite values as yours is very hard and demotivating. For example, when I was a freelancer I worked for 4 months for a tobacco company. They sell all different kind of tobacco for shisha. I don’t like tobacco at all, especially after my father had a heart attack because of smoking for more than 10 years. But, I accepted this offer because money-wise was good and I was going to learn new skills.

As time went by, I realized it was a mistake because working for this company was very hard for me. I didn’t feel proud of myself. Even though the projects were interesting, I was feeling I was contributing to anything good for society. This is why finding a company with the same values and mission is very important.

What are your must-to-haves in a job to be happy?: This can be different things. For example, the type of team, the work you’re going to do, the salary, the location, etc. And usually is a combination of several things. For me, it’s working in a cross-functional team, being able to do user research and UI design and having a good work-life balance.

Which are your nice-to-haves?: Same as above but in this case, you can live without this. For me, it’s working close to my house and having full ownership in the whole UX cycle.

What are your “hard no’s”?: Which are those things that you are not going to accept, no matter what? For me, it’s not working in agile, not being included in the development team and not being included in the user research.

It’s better to have this plan written in a piece of paper or digital document rather than in your mind. It makes it more real and it makes you more conscious about it. Besides, you can always go to it, read it, change it, etc.

With this plan written down, you can start applying for jobs. And you’ll immediately notice that you’ll be much more critical than before. You’ll reject companies because their job description doesn’t match what you want. Same’ll happen in the interviews. You’ll know what to ask and you’ll evaluate the company as well.

It took me a while to realise the company is evaluating you during the hiring process, but you are also evaluating them. I always thought that the company was evaluating me and that was it.

Putting it into practice

My personal approach to put this into practice and get results it’s to set OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results) for each quarter. Last year I started setting OKRs for myself. I used to set goals yearly but what happened is that I totally forgot about them. I only remembered that I had those in November and most of the years I didn’t meet any goal (or at least very few).

So taking the idea from startups and from Rayana’s post I started setting OKRs. To do this, I take my career plan, go backwards and I think what can I do in the next quarter to be a little closer to that goal.

For example, I would like to work in a few years, in a company where I have the full ownership of the UX cycle. Which means I’m included in the strategic part of the product but I also design the UI. To achieve this, I need to improve some of the soft skills and other hard skills. Taking this into consideration, these are some of my goals for the first quarter:

- Make a strategy for my blog: Plan the content for Q1 and how I’m going to promote it. Writing has different benefits for a UX designer. But also, by taking the blog as a serious side-project, I’ll improve in planning and strategy.

- Write 6 blog posts: Be regular with my blog is an important goal.

- Ask for feedback to my colleagues at the end of each project. I like to receive feedback from my colleagues. But I also want to learn how to ask for feedback to receive the type of feedback that I’m looking for.

- Start my side-project which will allow me to practice the hard skills that I need to improve.

If you would like to read my resolutions for 2019 and my goals for this quarter, read my last post: What happened in 2018 and resolutions for 2019.

Now that I’ve been setting these OKRs for quite some time my approach is a bit different. I look at how many goals I accomplished the last quarter, how much time did I have, and according to this, I set the new ones. Which means that my goals are more realistic in time and more reachable. It’s really hard to set realistic goals but it’s something that you will learn with practice.

I started working in a new company 5 months ago. In this company, we need to set a development plan for the next 6 months so I’ll combine my OKR’s with this development plan. I’ll set different goals for my OKR’s for my development plan. Because for my development plan I’ll work on it during working hours and for my OKR’s I’ll work in my free time at home, so I can get twice done.

Wrap-up

Setting goals are something very personal. I’m a very goal-oriented person. I have them for everything, personal, professional and leisure ones. But I also know people who don’t like to do it and they don’t have any, they just live the moment and go with the flow. But regardless of your personality, I believe setting professional goals will help you move forward in your career and achieve this impossible life-goal of enjoying your job and be happy doing it.

Lastly, setting goals is also a soft skill that will help you move forward in your career. Because among other skills, you’ll get better at the long-term vision and setting realistic and measurable goals. Which is a very important skill if you want to grow into a senior position.

What do you think? Was this helpful for you? Do you also set professional goals? Let me know in the comments which are your approach!

English is not my mother tongue and I’m always looking for improvements. So if you spot any typo or any phrase that could have written in a better way I would love to read that feedback!

Do you want to know more about me?

• You can check my portfolio here: www.sabrinacouto.com
• You can also follow me on Twitter where I share my thoughts about design: @SabrinaCouto_
• Or if you are more curious about my personal life you can take a look at my Instagram account: sabrinacoutosc
• And of course, you can find me on Linkedin.