Setting professional goals

Setting professional goals

Setting professional goals at work is an essential thing. That is because there are several benefits of goal setting at work. Setting professional goals at work can help you realize the company’s objectives and missions easily. Therefore to set professional goals at work, there are some few things that one should know to ensure easy achieving of the set goals. According to the study, setting professional goals at work can serve four functions. The four duties include:

• Helping in evaluating control and performance.
• Helps to guide the employees
• Goals facilitate easy planning
• Helps to inspire and motivate the employees.

Thus goal setting at work helps in motivating the employees so that they remain focused on doing the organizations’ operations more effectively. The workplace goals involve some workplace goal preparations, breaking down the goals, personal and professional employee goals, and many more.

Therefore in this article, we are going to look at how to set goals, how to choose the right goals, how to set the development goals, how to set of performance goals and measuring the set goal performance.

How to set professional goals

Before embarking on setting the goals, there are some guiding principles that the goals should meet. Failure to adhere to those guidelines, achieving the set goals will be very hard. Many people set professional goals at work, but because of failing to adhere to those rules, the goals become hard to achieve. Always ensure your goals are SMART. Let now look at the meaning of smart goals.

• Specific

A professional set goal at work should have a particular objective of the goals set. According to research, many goals that are easily achieved are the ones with specific target/objectives. Therefore ensure the goals you set for yourself or the goals you set for the other employee’s aims at achieving a particular target. Always avoid broad goals because overall goals do not motivate people to attain the set objectives.

• Measurable.

It is essential to ensure once you have set specific goals, you can be able to measure the level of success towards realizing those set objectives. Therefore it is instrumental in setting goals that you can be able to measure the progress towards achieving them. For instance, you can set a goal of increasing your website traffic by 20 % through email marketing. Here the primary objective is to increase the website traffic by 20 %. Here the goal is measurable because you will be able to measure your level of success by comparing the current web traffic and previous and help you to know your progress.

• Assignable

Here the goals set should be assignable to either one person or a team. Many people set goals that are too general and cannot be assigned to anyone and hence fail in realizing them. Thus always ensure the goals you set for yourself or the other employees can be assignable to specific people or team to ensure proper tracking record of their progress.

• Relevant.

The professional goal set at work should be relevant to the company’s missions. As a manager or a person in charge of controlling the activities in a specific company, ensure the set goals are useful in contributing the company success. Therefore always ensure the set goals help to contribute to easy realization of the set objectives and the missions of the company. That motivate the workers to do their assigned duties well.

• Timely

The goals set should be time-related. That means the goals should be achieved within a given time. Here you should ensure the deadline for achieving the goals is not too far or too close. Ensure you provide the respective team involved enough time to attain their set goals. Avoid giving them little time because with short time there can be more mistakes due to rushing to achieve the set goals within the given time.

Choosing the right goals

There are different types of goals, and hence choosing the right goal for you is an essential thing. Most of the professional goals at work should be the short term goals (performance-based goal.) because they are set to be achieved shortly. The performance-based goals are very crucial because they help one in making the long term goals. Therefore the performance set goals describe the most critical work responsibilities the employees should be doing to achieve the set goals. These goals are essential in companies (KPI) key performance indicators. Some of the benefits of the performance goals are that the employees will be motivated to work more to achieve their set target. An example of a performance goal is where you can request the seller to improve the sales by 8% within the next two months. Here the employee will try to work more to achieve the set goal.

The professional development goal.

These goals aim at improving the employee’s skills and enhancing their ability in job functioning. The goal here can be focused on how one will get more skills to do the job. With improved skills, the performance will be excellent. Here the manager can decide to be holding a conference weekly to teach the employees on how to enhance their skills for better performance.

Therefore the main difference between the performance and development goals is that the performance goal is achieved at the results when one is evaluating the goals achieved while the other development gains in equipping the employees with the advanced skills.

Setting professional development goals.

Since the professional development goals primarily aim at equipping the employees with some new skills for better performance, therefore one can opt to do any of the following.

• Attend seminars

One can choose to attend workshops which teaches some skills that are related to his field.

• pursue a course

One can decide to register for a class and start learning. That will help in equipping him/her with the new skills that the person can use for improved performance at work. For instance, if you want to become a manager, you can opt for the following goals

• Complete the training course at the end of 4 years
• Learn more about office communication
• Improve some presentation skills before the end of the training
• Improve management skills
• Always attend all the training sessions.

Setting performance goals.

The performance goals refer to the short term aims set for a particular task in your current position (job position). These goals help one to know what exactly is required from the employee by the company in his/her present job position.

To set the performance-based goal, you need to identify the set goals you need to achieve because you have much control to make them happen. For instance, if your current job position is the sales manager, you can set goals that are related to marketing since you will have total control over the set goals, and hence achieving them becomes easy. for instance, you can set the following performance goals as a sales manager can be

• Increase weekly sales by 10 %
• Increase the salesforce by
• reducing the cost of marketing by 5% in the next year.

Therefore having set such performance goals, you are required to think about what to do to achieve them. For example, if you want to increase sales, you can use other forms of marketing your product to achieve the set goals. Here you can opt for social media marketing and offline marketing strategies.

How to measure the performance

Since the goals that you set are measurable, at this point, you are required to measure the success of your efforts towards realizing those goals.

For instance, if your goals were to increase the website traffic by 20 percent within two years. You can measure after every four months the increase in traffic and determine if the set goals will be achieved or not. If you realize that the set goals are being attained at a slow rate, you can opt to find a good SEO company to assist you in marketing your website. That will improve the number of people visiting your web.

After realizing all the set goals have been achieved, you can set new goals to keep your company growing. Also, if you understand the set goals have not been met, you can learn the thing you did not do well and improve on those areas next time.

You are therefore having known how to set professional goals, tips on choosing the right goals, setting the performance-based and professional development goals, and how to measure the performance. It is now clear you got all the essential information on how to set professional goals at work, and by considering the above-discussed information, you will set the best professional goals at work that will give you the best results.

Thank you.