The Career Seeker's Guide to Setting Tangible Goals

One of the most challenging aspects of making a career change is learning how to harness your dreams and make them happen. Bring your fantasy of "the perfect career for me" back down to earth and turn it into a workable plan that you can knock out step by step. I suggest you begin by setting tangible goals.

Let's start with the goal. When your mind is feeling creative and unrestrained, you might write down a career objective that sounds something like this:

Quit my job, open flower shop.

This is a great starting point and indeed a goal to aspire to, but the problem is that this goal has no time frame. You can see that you still need a practical working plan to help carry out this goal, along with a time frame to make it happen. Does this mean the goal is no good? Not at all! The idea is to keep this as your Master Goal, but then create smaller, practical sub-goals with timeframes that you can fulfill in order to reach this major milestone in your professional life.

When the time comes to set your personal goals... make sure they are tangible, measurable, realistic and include a time frame. Your goals should be achievable, yet also a stretch so you're pushing yourself beyond what you'd normally do in order to move forward.

One thing that you will find when setting goals, is that the best plans will manifest themselves in outline form. Beneath the umbrella goal of "Quit my job, open flower shop," you might list out a series of sub-goals. These could hypothetically be:

1. Start a savings plan.

2. Further business education.

3. Look into real estate possibilities for future store.

4. Do informational interviews - talk to others who own their own flower shop.

(There will be more goals on your list obviously).

Notice that these goals STILL are not meeting the requirement of being tangible, measurable, time-sensitive and so forth. Which is why you will then need to zoom in even closer on your list of goals to make them even more specific. Let's look at Sub Goal 1:

"Start a Savings Plan."

Here, you can break this down into still more stepping-stone goals, which could be: