Every important endeavor in your life needs some kind of North Star to help you determine whether you’re succeeding. Fitness professionals recommend having an overarching goal when planning a workout regime. Similarly, it’s valuable to have strategic aims for your career.
Professional goals are important, because they help you evaluate which of a variety of paths available to you is the ideal one to pursue. For example, if your aim is to play a leadership role in a company, then you might choose to get an advanced degree that hones your leadership skills. That time in school might slow your progress in getting promotions in your vertical in the short term, but will enable you to hone skills that will make you eligible for positions that weren’t an option without the degree.
The thing is, long-term career goals are not something you can “set and forget.” There are several reasons why you need to check back on them periodically.
Your understanding changes
Think back to your childhood. Can you remember what 8-year-old you wanted to do when you grew up? While you might be one of those rare people who fell in love with a career path at that age, chances are the thing you do now is not something you even envisioned back then. And your understanding of the world of work does not stop evolving at 8, 18, 28, or beyond.
As you learn more about what particular jobs entail, what you enjoy, and where you can make a contribution, your belief about the ideal role for you may also change. About once a year (perhaps aligned with your yearly HR evaluation), it’s useful to take stock of what you now think about the path you previously envisioned. Do you still feel like your goal is attainable and would allow you to have the impact you desire?
If you have doubts that you articulated the right goal, engage with an adviser, mentor, or coach to rethink that path. Those conversations can help you turn your growing awareness of how your career may unfold into a more refined vision for what success would look like for you.
Your values change
Part of what drives your long-term career goals is what you value. Research by Shalom Schwartz and colleagues has identified a set of broad values that characterize factors that drive people’s sense of what’s important to them. Roughly, these values differ along two dimensions: whether a person prizes openness to change versus conservatism, and whether they are focused more on the self or others.
Over the course of your life, your values may change. As a young person, you might focus on achievement (a combination of openness to change and self-development in which you value individual success). As a result, you might look for roles that will bring you accolades and attention. Over the years, you may shift to a focus that prizes the collective good rather than the individual. This shift in values may lead you to be less interested in visible leadership roles and more prone to seek opportunities to have a positive impact on your community.
I encourage you to think about the ways your values may have shifted. Imagine yourself in what you thought would be your dream job. If that no longer feels like it would represent the culmination of your ideal career path, think about what that dream job is missing. That sense of mismatch between what you thought you wanted and what feels best now is likely to be a reflection of a change in values. To what degree do you think that reflects differences in how much you value change or tradition and how much you value individual versus group benefits? Use that insight to rethink your goals.
The world changes
Even if you feel like you have a good understanding of your industry and your values have remained consistent, the world around you continues to evolve. Technology advances in ways that influence the impact of particular jobs. The political climate can affect what ventures are poised for success. Economic shifts may privilege one sector over another. Sectors as diverse as entertainment, higher education, and automobiles have witnessed significant world changes over the past 15 years that affect what it means to succeed in these domains.
It’s important to recognize that your career goals must adapt to many factors that are out of your control. Individuals who pursue outdated strategies are just as likely to see their efforts end in frustration as are companies that don’t remain agile in a dynamic world. It’s easy to express frustration over outside factors that may have blocked your progress. It takes courage to recognize that you need to pivot when circumstances change.
One of the best ways to ensure that you stay a step ahead of changes in the world is to focus on improving competence around key durable skills like learning, reasoning, communication, and interpersonal interactions. When you feel like external factors are making your specific skills obsolete, consider getting more education in skills that are more resistant to economic, political, and technological shifts.