Career goal setting for beginners

How do I set the right goals for myself at the beginning of my career? What types of jobs should I seek? How do I navigate and choose among the possibilities? Big questions like these fill your head if you are about to begin your career or have recently started it.

Here are some general guidelines that can help you.

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Explore and experiment

At the beginning of your career, a great principle is to explore and experiment. Experiment with different roles, tasks, or jobs to learn more about yourself. And explore new opportunities and alternatives when they offer themselves to better understand what’s out there. By exploring and experimenting, you build the (broad) experience that guides you towards your long-term career path.

Think of the beginning of your career as a process – instead of a fixed career result you have to reach. See the start of your career as a series of steps to discover more about yourself, work life in general, and potential career paths. With every step, as you gain more experience and discover more skills, you adjust your vision and direction.

Oppositely, if you make a too rigid vision for where you want to be in three, five, or ten years, you risk closing yourself off from many opportunities. It makes sense to have long-term aspirations, but planning your career in too much detail and too long in advance could work against you. Don’t say to yourself, “I have to be X in five years and Y in ten years.” Instead, let your goals emerge from your experiences.

Also, acknowledge that most people have hiccups in their careers. That isn’t necessarily bad because those hiccups may be the inspiration for new and valuable directions. So, don’t worry too much about getting it wrong and let that hold you back from taking some chances with your career choices.

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Be careful about other people’s career advice

You probably have people around you who are eager to give you recommendations, such as your parents, family and friends, and people in your network. And they usually have the best intentions. But what worked for them may not work for you. If they have other personalities, strengths, and values than you, their advice may be wrong for you instead of right.

In essence, your goals must come from within. So, while you should listen to other people’s advice, remember that the decision is yours.

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Focus your career on your natural strengths

To make the most of who you are, focus your energy on your areas of natural strengths (instead of weaknesses). For example, gravitate toward your natural strengths when selecting new tasks, projects, and assignments. That’s also where you should prioritize improving and set the highest demands for your performance.

And when you seek jobs, go for jobs that play to your natural strengths. As long as enough of what you do is within your strengths zone, you’re okay because your weaknesses diminish in relative importance. Conversely, if you’re in a job that doesn’t play to your strengths but to your weaknesses, it’s time for a change. Look for another job or try to redefine your current job.

In this article, I give some tips about how to identify your natural strengths.

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Align your career decisions with your work values

Work values are why you work. They are your prime source of motivation for working, your way of feeling successful and fulfilled. Work values can be generalized into three groups:

1. Money, security, and status. If you’re in this group, your main motivation is to get a predictable income from a steady job. And you may be motivated by the social status and power you gain from your job.
2. Social connection. Here, your main reason for working is social connections. You highly value working with others, whether colleagues, partners, clients, patients, or customers.
3. Self-expression. In this group, your key motivator is the work itself. You express yourself through your work, and (in its purest form) you work just because you find it meaningful and exciting – as long as your basic needs are met.

No one of these work values is “better” or more acceptable than the others. For instance, if you don’t feel like pursuing a prestigious career, that’s perfectly fine. No one can define your work values for you. They are, by definition, personal. And they differ a lot. The critical point is to be true to your work values when you make career decisions.

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Follow your interests – but not too narrowly

Interests are less important than work values when it comes to guiding your career. Because if your work values are severely compromised, it doesn’t matter that you work with something that interests you.

Additionally, interests are more short-term and fluid in nature than values. Interests come and go; you are not born with an interest in something concrete, like neurosurgery or cattle farming. Instead, interests often develop quite by themselves as the result of working with something.

That is why you should only use your interests as a guide to a certain extent. If you are interested in something, that can obviously give you solid direction. However, if you have not yet developed an interest in something, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try going in that direction. Especially if new challenges are within your strengths zone and in harmony with your work values, you should be able to develop interests in entirely new areas.

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Pick the right workplace

Getting into a good workplace is a priority because you take shape from it. You will, unavoidably, be a product of the people you work with and network with. You will learn and adapt their strategies, routines, habits, techniques, values, attitudes, and behaviors – whether right or wrong, professional or unprofessional. Consciously or unconsciously, you will learn how to do things.

Therefore, a good strategy is to go for jobs where you know you will learn the right things. And prioritize that over short-term goals such as salary or quick promotions. Deliberately look for jobs where you believe you’ll learn something that sets you up for success later in your career.

Additionally, don’t just go for the hard skills part of the job. Soft skills are equally important, so include the organization’s culture and values in your criteria. Culture and values differ significantly between organizations, and you have to fit in and feel good, too!

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This is the third in a series of 14 articles that will convey the main concepts of our book 12 Universal Skills to LinkedIn readers – especially those at the beginning of their careers.

For more on the topic, have a look at our book 12 Universal Skills: The Beginner’s Guide to a Successful Work Life.