5 Steps to Set and Achieve Your Career Goals

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January provides a natural fresh start to reexamine career goals and adjust your strategy to make your dreams a reality. Sure, you can use the calendar change to resolve to lose weight or kick a bad habit, but you can also use it to put some renewed energy into your work. So where should you begin?

Setting and Achieving Your Career Goals

  1. Start with your imagination. Close your eyes. It is New Years Day, next year. You are looking back on the year you just completed–on all that you’re proud of and happy to have experienced and accomplished. What happened over the year to make you feel that way? What are those career highlights? Jot them down.

  2. Reflect on your current reality. Think through what you want and what you are dissatisfied with in your current state. What are your pain points in your career? Frustrations in your current job? Hopes?

  3. Get clear on your 10-year career goals and then work backward. Do you know where you want to be a decade from now? While your aspirations will likely change, it’s important to determine where you want to go so you can have a clear direction in your goals today. You always have the freedom to change direction, but you need to get clear on a long-term goal you want to aim for today.

  4. Flesh out the practical steps you can take to move the needle in the next 90 days. After you have fleshed out what you want your career to look like in ten years, determine what needs to happen within the next five years to get you there. What about three years? Two? What needs to happen this year to help you in the direction of your career goals? Now, what steps do you need to take this quarter to help you reach those one-year goals? This is what you need to focus on now.

  5. Keep those 90-day goals in front of you on your desk. As you plan your tasks for the week, your calendar, and your to do list, make sure you are taking steps this week that will move the ball down the field toward your 90-day goals.

The truth is, you can do something in the next five minutes that will advance your career, whether it is reaching out to an old colleague, reading an article on industry predictions, or logging on to LinkedIn to do a quick review of your profile. There’s no reason that this can’t be the year you make great leaps in your career. It starts with clarity in identifying what you want and the clear steps you need to take to get there.

For help crystallizing your 2020 goals, download the free New Year’s Goal Setting Workbook.

A version of this article originally appeared on McKinleyMarketingPartners.com.