How to achieve your career goals in 2022

According to a recent article in Forbes, 16% of people will have made New Year resolutions to meet career or job goals. Sadly, statistics also show that after 6 months only 46% of those who set resolutions were keeping them.

Even if you haven’t set a formal resolution, many of us still start the New Year with ambitions of how we would like to move our careers forward, but without clear action we are highly likely to end 2022 in the same place that we started.

One of the most important things to do when trying to achieve a resolution or career ambition is to set a clear goal. A great way to do this is to use our SMART Goal setting tool in our mentoring platform. This tool helps to ensure that you set realistic, achievable goals:

Specific

What needs to be achieved. Be specific, think about how you could clearly demonstrate you have achieved the goal (e.g., Improve my communication skills by talking to someone new within my organisation every week.).

Measurable

How will you measure if it has been achieved? (“Improve my communication skills by talking to someone new within my organisation every week” can be measured. “Improve my communication skills “can’t be measured.)

Achievable

Whilst your goal needs to stretch and challenge you, it must be something that is within your control and ability to be able to achieve.

Realistic

It is reasonable to expect you to set goals only in areas in which you have some influence and not ones that can be derailed completely by factors beyond your control.

Timebound

A goal should always include a time frame so that you can track progress and ensure it is completed within a realistic timeframe.

You may have a few different goals, long term, mid-term, and short term. These may be linked in some way, as you may need to achieve a short-term goal in order to make a mid- or long-term goal more achievable. In the example above a long-term goal could be to achieve promotion to a specific job role within 5 years. The short-term goal is something that supports this overall long-term goal as you may be aware that good communication skills will be important in achieving your long-term goal.

Get a Mentor

These types of short-, mid- and long-term goals can all form part of an overall career plan. Putting together a career plan can be a big task, but one that can be made easier by working with a mentor.

A mentor can help you to identify your long-term goals and then shorter-term goals that will move you along towards achieving your long-term ones. The mentor can work with you to help identify the strengths and opportunities you can capitalise on to help achieve your goals and to help you identify and overcome weaknesses and challenges that could derail your ambitions.

Having a mentor will mean that you will be better able to keep your goals on track by ensuring you remain focussed through regular meetings and achieve and celebrate important milestones along the way – an important motivator.

A mentor will give you an impartial view and may have alternative routes that you could take to achieving your goals that you may not have considered. As well as providing support they will give you honest feedback and act as a sounding board for your ideas

Getting the support of a mentor could be just the springboard you need in 2022.

 ABDO Peer to Peer Mentoring platform can be accessed here.