Have you sat down to think about what your career goals are?
It can be an intimidating prospect, if you haven’t spent much time on them in the past. This is doubly true for folks who are in the early stages of their career, and feeling uncertain about where they will end up.
Fortunately, I’ve got questions and exercises you can use to set realistic, flexible career goals. And once the goals are in place, it becomes a lot easier to map your career trajectory and make plans for the future.
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Setting career goals: Categorical thinking
When you actually write career goals down, it can feel overwhelming because there are so many different ways to think about them. The key is to break up career goals into categories, so that you can focus on one aspect at a time.
Here are some good places to start, with career goal examples along the way:
Long-term, short-term, and in-between
We’ll start with this category, because it can be applied across the rest of the career goal categories to follow. When you’re thinking about career goals, you don’t always have to be thinking about 10 or 15 years from now.
Instead, it makes more sense to focus on short-term goals (or perhaps somewhere between short- and long-term.)
For example, you may dream of one day running your own restaurant. That’s a great long-term dream, but if you’re at the start of your career in the food industry, you probably have a long way to go before you can operate a restaurant.
Instead, think of some short-term goals. Depending on where you are now, shorter-term career goal examples might be:
- Get a job working in a kitchen
- Find a chef who can be your mentor
- Save up money for culinary school
- Take course on restaurant ownership and management
- Spend 5 hours a week developing recipes
All of these are far more attainable than “open my own restaurant,” at least in the immediate future.
Industry career goals
Here’s some good news: You don’t need to know exactly what industry, job, or role you want to have in the future to set career goals. Even if you’re still in high school or an undergraduate, or if you’ve chosen an alternative to college as you’ve made your way to the workforce, you can still set meaningful career goals for yourself.
But if you do want to set career goals specific to your industry, then obviously you’ll need to have some idea of what jobs you plan to work. If you need help actually choosing a career field or industry to go into, we have separate resources for those. You can find them here:
Once you’ve narrowed down what you want to do, then you can begin building career goals. These might be around picking up specific skills, landing a specific role or title, or building up a solid career portfolio that will help you hit milestones more quickly.
Related: Career portfolio goal examples
Skill-based career goals
Skills are one of the most practical things to build career goals around, because they’re within your control no matter what industry you’re in or what stage of your career you’re at. Whether you’re in sales, healthcare, marketing, or anything else, there’s a skill you can point to and say, “I want to get better at that.”
The trick is getting specific. “Improve my communication skills” is a fine starting point, but it’s too broad to actually act on. Break it down into something you can practice and measure.
Here are some skill-based career goal examples:
- Get comfortable speaking in front of a group of 10 or more people
- Learn how to read a basic financial statement
- Practice active listening in every client or customer conversation this month
- Get certified in a specific software or program relevant to your field
- Improve your cold-calling or cold-outreach numbers by a set percentage
If you’re in a sales role, or considering one, skill-based goals are especially useful because sales rewards incremental improvement. Getting a little better at objection handling, or a little more comfortable making the ask, adds up fast over a few months.
Check out these articles for more advice around skill-based career goals:
Financial career goals
Money isn’t the only reason to work, but it’s a real part of why most of us do. There’s nothing wrong with setting career goals that are directly tied to your income or your financial security.
Financial career goals look different depending on your current situation. If you’re just starting out, your goal might be as simple as covering your own expenses without help. If you’ve been working a few years, it might be about hitting a specific salary number, building savings, or paying down debt.
Let’s look at some financial career goal examples:
- Negotiate your starting salary instead of accepting the first offer
- Hit a specific income goal within the next 12 months
- Build an emergency fund equal to three months of expenses
- Pay down student loan debt
- Pay off a specific loan or credit card balance by a set date
- Start contributing to a retirement account
These goals tend to work best when they’re tied to a number and a deadline. “Make more money” doesn’t give you anything to aim at. “Increase my income by 15% in the next year” does.
Here are our best financial advice articles, if you want to focus in this area:
Here are our best financial advice articles, if you want to focus in this area:
Personal growth career goals
Not every career goal has to be about your job title, your paycheck, or your resume. Some of the most useful goals are about the person you’re becoming while you build your career.
This category covers things like confidence, discipline, work-life balance, and how you handle stress or setbacks. These goals often get overlooked because they’re harder to measure, but they can have just as much impact on your career as any promotion.
Some personal growth career goal examples:
- Set a boundary around work hours and actually stick to it
- Ask for feedback from a manager or mentor once a month
- Get comfortable saying no to projects that don’t align with your goals
- Build a habit of reflecting on wins and lessons at the end of each week
- Start keeping a work accomplishment tracker and maintain it for 12 months
- Work on managing stress in high-pressure moments instead of avoiding them
If you’ve ever felt burned out or unsure of yourself at work, a goal in this category might matter more right now than a goal about title or salary.
Mapping your career goals
Once you have your career goals in place, the next step is to make progress toward them. This requires some more thinking, because even simple, short-term goals usually take some planning.
This advice is so common that it feels like a trope, but it’s true: Breaking up your goals into smaller steps will help you achieve them with more efficiency.
For example, if your career goal is to bring in another $10,000 this year, you might break that down into steps such as:
- Make plan to discuss salary increase with manager
- Research side-hustle and freelance opportunities
- Pick up 5 extra shifts per month to start
Or if you chose a personal goal, like “improve my work-life balance,” your initial steps might be:
- Run a “time audit” on working vs. resting hours
- Remove notifications on email after 5 p.m.
- Book week-long staycation
In most cases, you’ll want to set out only a few steps at a time, then wait until you have results before you map out the next steps.
How to actually stick to your career goals
Setting the goal is the easy part. The follow-through is where most people fall off, usually within the first few weeks.
A few things that make career goals more likely to stick:
Write it down somewhere you’ll see it often. A goal that lives only in your head competes with everything else you’re thinking about on a given day, and it usually loses. Put it in a notes app, a journal, a sticky note on your monitor. Somewhere you’ll run into it without having to go looking for it.
Revisit it every few months. Career goals shift as your job changes, your priorities reshuffle, or you learn something new about the field. Check in on it every quarter or so, because adjusting your career goals is part of the process.
Focus on one or two goals at a time. Ten goals split your attention ten ways, making it a lot less likely that you’ll achieve any of them completely. Pick the one or two that matter most right now and let the rest wait their turn.
Tell someone else about it. A goal you’ve said out loud to a mentor, friend, or manager carries a different kind of weight than one you’ve kept private. Mentioning it to someone who might ask about it later gives you a small built-in accountability check.
Track your progress somewhere you can actually see it. A checklist, a habit tracker, a simple note of what you did each week. Momentum is easier to feel when you can see it building.
Career goals aren’t meant to be permanent. What mattered at 19 might not matter at 24, and that’s fine. Give yourself direction while you figure out the rest, and let the plan change shape as you do.
Setting career goals is a lot easier when you have a place to actually practice them. At Vector, you can build real, transferable skills—communication, sales, time management, and confidence—while earning money and hitting short-term milestones that move you toward the bigger picture. Request an interview here.
