Why Should You Do Goal Setting in Career Planning?
Career planning is a process that can go on for decades as you progress through your career. You need to set goals along your career path to prevent you from becoming lost or losing your focus along the way. Having some idea of where you hope to be at intervals of five and 10 years can help you to gauge your progress.
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Goals
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The goals that you set need to be customized to your own preferences, ambitions and methodologies. Even if your career involves working with or for others, your goals for career advancement should be solely your own. Reassess your goals every few years in a formalized way, determining for yourself if the path that you are on is still the one that you want. For career goals to be useful, they need to be flexible enough to accommodate the inevitable personal and professional growth and change that you will experience over the course of your career.
Timing
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A large part of career success is being in the right place at the right time. For some people this is a matter of luck, but for those who put the effort into planning their careers, this can be something that they cause to happen. Knowing when you are ready to advance to the next stage of your career is a sign of maturity. If you attempt to climb the ladder too quickly, you risk overtaking your own skills and sabotaging your progress. Talk as much as you can with people who have more experience than you in your field and get a sense of what is considered a reasonable rate of progress.
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Flexibility
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People who design an excessively rigid career plan when they are young either fail to meet their goals or eventually become miserable within them. Anyone who ages and progresses through a career without learning and changing cannot really be considered successful. You must leave space within your career plan for your own unpredictable transformations. Some people even change careers entirely in middle age and are happier after they do so. The success and money that your career brings you are only useful when they give you happiness.
Later Years
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Beginning to make plans for your retirement when you are still young is an effective way to avoid stressing about it in your late middle age. You have no way of knowing how old you will be when you decide or are forced to stop working. Therefore, it is to your advantage to have a substantial margin of error in the savings that you have amassed for your retirement. An adequate savings plan, almost by definition, requires extensive planning to take advantage of the compounding interest that is a dominant characteristic of effective retirement plans.
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References
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