How to Set Career Goals (With Examples)

A career goal worth setting has two ends: a direction you care about, a few years out, and a next step small enough to take this week. “Get promoted”, “learn new skills” and “grow my network” have neither, which is why so many lists of career goals examples change nothing: they skip the reason and the next move.

Long-term goals set a direction several years out; short-term goals cover the next few months to a year, and each should be a step toward a long-term one. This guide applies the core goal-setting method to work in four steps, then gives sample goals for four career stages:

1. Reflect on your direction and what you value
2. Choose a mix of skill, role, network and pay goals
3. Write each goal as a specific next step
4. Review your goals with a manager or mentor

Prefer to watch? The video covers the same ground as this article.

VideoHow to Set Career Goals (With Examples)WiserHours

Career goals stall when the reason or the next step is missing

Career goals tend to fail in two places: the goal is one you feel you ought to want, or it never gets a next step. In a 2002 analysis pooling seven studies, mostly of university students, Richard Koestner and colleagues at McGill University in Canada found that goals people pursued out of interest or conviction went with more progress than goals pursued out of pressure or guilt.¹

Koestner’s team calls these goals “self-concordant” and, following Kennon Sheldon’s work, describes them as drawing on sustained effort that holds up against distractions. In two new studies, progress was best when such a goal also came with a plan saying when, where and how the person would act.¹ The pooled studies were correlational and short, so they point to an association rather than cause and effect.

Picture two analysts who both write “become a team lead within two years”. One enjoys coaching new hires; the other sees everyone from his graduate intake heading that way. Only the first goal has a reason that will survive a bad week.

So before you commit to a goal, write the reason next to it. If the honest reason starts with “I should” or “people expect”, treat the goal as a question to explore rather than a commitment.

How to set career goals, from direction to next step

Work from the general to the particular, then test the result on someone who knows the work.

1. 1Reflectdirection and values first
2. 2Choose a mixskill, role, network, pay
3. 3Write the next stepresult, date and first action
4. 4Review with someonethen adjust the direction

Then repeat from “Reflect”

1. Reflect on your direction and what you value

Start with a blank page before any goal. Write about the working life you want in five years or so, the work you have enjoyed and done well, and what you want more and less of. England’s National Careers Service suggests a similar inventory for spotting your skills: think about your current or most recent job, reflect on past education and work, and ask people who know you well outside work for a different view.²

The careers education researcher Michael Healy summarizes two reviews of career counseling that support this kind of reflection: written exercises were among the ingredients Steven Brown and Nancy Ryan Krane linked to effective career interventions in 2000, and values clarification was added by Susan Whiston and colleagues in 2017.³ Those studies mostly measured how decided and confident people felt about career choices, not later pay or promotion.⁴

A nurse might notice that her best days were spent teaching students on the ward, and her worst on scheduling disputes: a direction, clinical teaching, before any goal exists. End with a sentence or two of direction rather than a job title, and let a flexible five-year plan hold the longer view.

2. Choose a mix of skill, role, network and pay goals

Most career goals are one of four kinds, and they differ in how much of the result is in your hands:

• A skill goal is about what you can do, and it is mostly yours to move. According to England’s National Careers Service, employers look for a mix of specific skills and transferable ones such as teamwork and communication.²
• A role goal is about the responsibility or job you want next, such as leading a project or a promotion. Other people decide part of it.
• A network goal is about who knows your work and whom you learn from. Tahatū, New Zealand’s government careers service, gives the example of meeting one marketing manager a month to learn the way into an industry.⁵
• A pay goal is about what you earn and on what terms. Like a role goal, it depends partly on other people’s decisions.

1. Direction: the working life you are aiming at, and the reason next to each goal
2. Skill goals: what you can do; mostly in your own hands
3. Role goals: the responsibility or job you want next; partly decided by others
4. Network goals: who knows your work, and whom you learn from; mostly worked on week by week
5. Pay goals: what you earn and on what terms; also partly decided by others

Role and pay decisions come rarely, so skill and network goals give you something to work on every week in between. For help weighing these kinds against each other, see the research on how careers actually grow. Tahatū suggests three to five big goals to take you where you want to be in five or even ten years.⁵

3. Write each goal as a specific next step

A career goal becomes usable when it names a result, a date and a first action. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, whose research developed goal-setting theory, concluded in a 2002 review that clear, demanding goals reliably produced better performance than simply telling people to do their best.⁶ The SMART checklist, with 20 worked examples, is one way to test the wording.

Tahatū advises breaking each goal into steps small enough to feel easy, noting for each what you will do, how, what you will need and the deadline.⁵ Naming the moment and place you will start, an implementation intentionimplementation intention: A plan in if-then form that ties a specific action to a specific situation, such as 'if it is nine o'clock, then I open the report.' It hands the decision about when and where to act to the situation itself.Full entry in the glossary, helps too: across the 13 published studies Koestner’s team pooled, such plans went with more progress, including two on writing a CV, though the team’s own New Year’s resolutions study found no direct benefit.¹

4. Review your goals with a manager or mentor

Another person improves your career goals mainly by adding information you lack: what the organization needs, which skills count at the next level, how long a step takes. Locke and Latham report that the main benefit of involving people in goal decisions is the information exchanged. In one experiment they describe, taking part in setting the goal made no difference once its difficulty was held constant, but working out strategies with others improved performance.⁶

Career-counseling research points the same way: a 2017 meta-analysis of 57 studies by Whiston and colleagues concluded that counselor support appears to be a critical ingredient (its abstract was all we could read).⁴

Bring one page with your direction, goals and first steps. Ask which goals the team would value most, what would earn you the next step up, and what you are missing. Then agree when to look again; Locke and Latham describe feedback on progress as what lets people adjust their effort and strategy.⁶ Without a manager you can talk to openly, a mentor, peer or public careers adviser can play the part. Check what free careers advice your country, employer or university offers.

Your career goals on one page

• A sentence or two of direction, with the reason behind it
• Three to five goals, mixing skill, role, network and pay
• A result and a date for each goal
• A first step for each, small enough to do this week
• A review booked with a manager, mentor or adviser

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Does writing out your career goals make a difference?

Writing goals out at length helped struggling students in one small Canadian trial, but a larger independent trial found no clear effect. Neither measured careers, so treat writing as a way to think clearly.

The study

Limited evidence

A written goal exercise for struggling students at McGill University, 2010

Dominique Morisano and colleagues randomly assigned 85 struggling students to an online goal-setting program or a control task. The program asked them to write freely about their ideal future, including school and career, then pick specific goals, give reasons, plan steps and obstacles, and set benchmarks. Four months later the goal group’s grade point averages had risen from about 2.3 to 2.9, while the control group showed no clear change.⁷

The program was adapted from one developed by a co-author, Jordan Peterson.⁷ Related versions are now sold online as the Self Authoring suite, whose founders include Peterson and another co-author, Robert Pihl.⁸ When the economist Christopher Dobronyi and colleagues tested closely related exercises with roughly 1,400 new undergraduates at another large Canadian university, they found no evidence of an effect on grades, credits or staying on into the second year. They pointed out that the earlier trial was small and recruited students who said they were struggling.⁹

Why the two results differ is not settled. An evening spent on three pages about your ideal working life can end two ways. If it ends with a direction and one step booked for next week, it did its work; if it ends with pages and no step, nothing in either trial suggests the pages will help by themselves.

Career goals examples for four stages of working life

These examples show what the four steps can produce at different stages; they are illustrations, not goals to copy. Each names its kind and whether it is short-term (the next year) or long-term (several years out).

Early in your career

Early goals build skills and get your work seen by people outside your own team.

• Present one project to senior managers on my own before the end of the year (role, short-term).
• Learn our team’s reporting tool well enough to build a report without help within four months (skill, short-term).
• Have a half-hour conversation each month with someone in a team I might want to join (network, short-term).
• Lead a small team in my field within five years (role, long-term).

In mid-career

By mid-career, goals often shift from doing the work well to shaping it.

• Take on one cross-team project this year that uses skills my current role does not (skill, short-term).
• Mentor one newer colleague through their first year (network, short-term).
• Agree with my manager what would make me a candidate for the next level, and review it each quarter (role, short-term).
• Move from running a process to setting its direction within three years (role, long-term).

When you are changing careers

A career change is easier to test in small pieces before you commit, as the guide on whether to switch careers explains, so the first goals are experiments.

• Talk to three people who do the work I am considering before the end of next month (network, short-term).
• Complete one short course or volunteer project in the new field within six months (skill, short-term).
• Rewrite my CV around the skills that carry over and test it on two applications (role, short-term).
• Work in the new field, at a level I can live on, within two years (role, long-term).

As a freelancer or self-employed

Without a manager, you choose your reviewer, and pay goals are set with clients.

• Raise my rate for new clients next quarter and note how many accept (pay, short-term).
• Win one client in a sector I have not worked in before (role, short-term).
• Join a professional group in my field and attend its meetings for six months (network, short-term).
• Earn most of my income from work I choose rather than work I accept, within five years (pay, long-term).

Start from the stage closest to yours and swap in your own field and dates. A goal copied word for word skips step 1, where its reason comes from.

How to answer “What are your career goals?” in an interview

Interviewers who ask about career goals mainly want to know whether the job will help you get where you want to go, since a good fit makes you likelier to stay. TARGETjobs, a UK graduate careers publisher, adds that the question also tests what you know about the sector and the employer.¹⁰

A strong answer has three parts: a short-term goal tied to this role, a longer direction, and how the job connects them. TARGETjobs says it is fine to admit your long-term goals are open, as long as your short-term goals clearly involve this sector and, ideally, this employer.¹⁰ An early-career answer might run: “Next, I want to handle client work end to end. Longer term, I’d like to lead projects, which is why your training program appeals.”

TARGETjobs warns against saying you would rather work in another sector or for another employer, and notes that “to be doing your job” now sounds arrogant rather than ambitious.¹⁰ Prepare the rest with this interview preparation guide.

Which steps rest on studies, and which on careers advice?

The strongest evidence supports specific goals that fit your own values; written goal exercises have mixed results, and the mix of goal types rests on guidance, not tests.

The bottom line

Write your direction and the reason for it before any goal, then choose a few goals of different kinds and give each a first step you can take this week. Show the page to someone who knows the work, ask what you are missing, and book the next review before you leave the conversation.