Professional Goals in IT for Developers
What are Career Goals?
People set certain goals and undertakings in almost every sphere of their lives, and a professional area is not an exception. When starting a new job, usually, you understand what you will be doing there and what are the opportunities for growth and development.
Career goals help sharpen your working “to-do list” and determine your targets for the next couple of years. They motivate professionals to put effort into improving their skills and knowledge and become more competent in their field of work. Professionals goals are like guidelines for those who want to understand what actions will lead them to get a promotion or be able to increase the level of their performance.
What is essential, you have to set correct and realistic development goals, creating a plan for your development, and follow it during a specific period. Such career goals can be long- and short-term, but they have to be achievable, well-thought, and adequate despite their type. Setting some unrealistic tasks that will take much more time then you have indicated won’t be efficient and more likely to bring burnout rather than success. To avoid that, it is essential to have a grasp of achievable professional goals and know the right tactics for setting them. Thus, after addressing the question “what are career goals,” let’s start with defining examples of development goals.
Professional Goals Examples
It is sufficient to keep in mind your long-term goals and make sure that being an IT developer is putting you on the path of achieving your development goals within the next few years. There are many challenging tasks a professional in software engineering faces every day, so it is necessary to define whether the time you put into solving those issues is worth it. To become a more skilled professional who can fulfill one’s professional endeavors, we have prepared a compilation of professional goals examples to help you out, so let’s review some of them.
- Become an expert in a domain/language/technology, or, in other words, learn programming languages that will help you in developing more user-friendly and smooth applications.
- Receive experience in using advanced technologies and utilize them to improve your performance
- Improve teamwork and communication skills to be able to produce stronger results when collaborating with other professionals and successfully coordinate mutual projects
- Move up the career ladder from junior to a middle specialist, and then become a senior who can mentor newbies, face arduous issues, and has a “name” in the company
- Enhance performance metrics by ensuring customer satisfaction (delivering projects of high quality within the deadline, help company reduce costs) and maintaining a comfortable working environment
- Get a dream job at the corporation with a world-known name after applying for several positions and sharpening one’s skills
- Improve your network by asking for feedback from your colleagues and helping each other to receive new job opportunities. Such an approach will help in achieving long-term goals.
- Build applications that will positively influence society and invest fully during the process of its development
- Win an industry award for making a valuable impact on the development of IT
- Start your own business.
Therefore, these are some outlines of career goals, which you can follow as they are or add something to make them more personal. Actually, professionals have developed some methods aimed at setting professional development goals, so why not check them?
How to Set Goals for Professional Development?
There are numerous methods and ways that are suitable for defining the ways of achieving your professional growth goals. Nevertheless, as in many other cases, a “one size fits all approach” isn’t applicable in this situation. It would be useful to understand what workflow, environment, pace, priorities, and deadlines you have before setting any development objectives. However, you can use some popular methods as a base for your own strategy, and it’s time to move on to reviewing them.
1. OGTM (objective, goal, tactics, metrics)
This method implies figuring out a broad goal and then making it more specific. One of the examples of development goals might be earning a professional certificate. This objective is generalized and long-term, likely to be achieved in a couple of months or within a year. Further, you have to make it more tangible and clear, like signing up for specified courses or making up a learning schedule by yourself.
Tactics are like steps towards your aim that aid in getting closer to the desired result in a robust manner. For example, you can take the first class to see whether an individual approach is suitable for you or you need to adjust it. Metrics is about assessing the results and the progress on track to meeting the target.
2. SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound)
Let’s say your sample career goal is to obtain a managerial position within a couple of years. Such a definition is clear and concise, so you know that your expectations will meet reality. The next concept contains an indication of how the result is measured. For example, mentor three people, utilize two programming languages, and offer four strategies every month to improve general performance.
Besides, you need to understand how to be an effective leader and utilize some tactics during mentoring others. Your development objectives must be realistic, and the mechanism for achieving them must be clear. Say, a developer won’t see the progress in case he/she hasn’t dedicated enough time or irrationally divided the steps towards reaching the target.
In this case, relevant implies understanding whether you can’t do without this developmental goal or there are other approaches, which might be more efficient. Time-bound is about setting deadlines and striving to reach your career goal before the deadline approaches. Surely, you can divide this aim into several parts and reach them whenever it’s more convenient. However, if you want to achieve results, you have to step out of your comfort zone and try to comply with the time frames. By having a specific date till which you have to receive an offer for a job promotion, you will be more dedicated and eager to get your work done in a more qualitative way.
3. Brian Tracy Method
This one is based on a clear vision of the result. There are two fundamental points in this technique: visualization, that is, the image of the situation at the point where you have already reached the goal, and a strong desire to achieve results as an incentive for goal-setting. The following principles will also help here:
- State the expected result in a believable way. Analyze your current career prospect and define what you can achieve in the near future.
- Use the 24-hour criterion to choose what to focus your efforts on. Imagine that you can achieve one of your career goals on the next day. Choose which one will have the greatest impact on your life and make it the main one.
- To strengthen the intention, supplement your employee development goal with a couple of the benefits you will get after achieving it. For example, when you apply for a vacancy at a more prestigious company, you will get more skills and knowledge, receive the ability for self-realization, have better career opportunities, and become a more demanded specialist.
Wrapping Up
Career goals examples are useful for those developers who find it hard to decide what they want to achieve within a certain period. Nowadays, you can implement multiple strategies to set development goals and identify what skills you need to obtain or what knowledge would suffice for reaching your targets. Hopefully, you will choose something that will inspire you to keep working and putting effort among multiple professional development goals examples mentioned above.
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