Enabling Your Team to Define Clear Career Goals
Have you ever heard of SMART goals? Odds are, yes, you’ve heard about them from multiple sources, many times. But where did the idea behind SMART goals come from?
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s research from the early 90s paved the way for naming objectives and striving to reach them: “A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance.”
The theory lays out five principles to help people create clear, achievable goals:
- Clarity
- Challenge
- Commitment
- Feedback
- Complexity
In this post, we’ll dig into these principles further to see how you can apply each one to help your employees set clear career goals.
1. Clarity
“Clear as mud,” as my dad used to say. If you want your employees to create achievable goals, they need to be crystal clear (or at least pretty close). For example, “land a management position” is a goal, but could use a clarity boost.
If your employees are creating vague goals, prompt them to add in more detail with questions like:
- What exact role do you want to land?
- What’s the timeline to achieve this goal?
- What specific steps will you take to reach this goal?
A clear objective that builds off the original could be, “complete a digital marketing certificate over the next year to upskill from a content marketer to a digital marketing manager.” Encourage your employees to find diverse courses or programs that fit their lifestyle and can help them hit their goals.
2. Challenge
Clarity and challenge often go hand-in-hand when it comes to goal setting—adding more details will inherently make hitting it more of a challenge (hopefully in a fun way).
You want your employees to have achievable goals (failure happens too, and that’s cool) but they shouldn’t be easy. To get the feel-good benefits of reaching an objective, they need to put in time and effort needs to make it happen. It’s a chance for your employees to show their stuff and start seeing career growth happening right before their eyes.
When it comes to career goals, challenge can be interpreted in many ways. You can encourage employees to take learning outside of their scope of work that doesn’t directly relate to their day-to-day, gaining knowledge to help fill a company skills gap. Instead of a staff member taking one course, why not challenge them to take several that bundle into a certificate? Start by understanding where they want to go and then figure out how they can challenge themselves to get there.
3. Commitment
A goal might look good on paper, but it doesn’t mean anything until you’ve taken steps to reach it. While support from their leader will be important, employees need to be invested in their goals and ready to tackle them head on.
One way to do this is by showing your employees how their goal ladders up to larger org-wide goals. For example, if there’s a projected skills gap for a data analyst, your employee can see how their time invested in related upskilling courses will help bridge it—and maybe even lead to a career move.
4. Feedback
Your employees want to know you have their back.
After helping them develop their goals, make sure to check in on a regular basis to see how they’re coming along. Provide feedback, both positive and constructive, to keep things on track. If a goal ladders up to an org-wide objective, you can keep them up to date on its status as well.
Let’s say your employee has a goal of attaining micro-credentials in conflict management to help them move into a management position. As the courses begin, provide feedback and suggestions on ways they can use their newfound knowledge in practical ways and help guide them along the way.
5. Complexity
While you’ll want an employee’s goal to be challenging, you don’t want it to become overly complex. Having too many milestones to hit along the way to success can be disheartening.
Make sure your employee sets a healthy timeline to achieve their goal and let them know there’s wiggle room if they need it. Encouraging them to create a workback schedule is a great way for them to see each step of the goal, deadlines and time to completion.
For example, one of your employees sets the goal of completing a five-course certificate within a year. While this goal is ambitious, it could become too complex by having to take two courses a semester on top of work and life. And yet it’s a great goal. Work with them to extend the timeline to ensure reaching the goal doesn’t become too complex.
Celebrating Clear Career Goals
With clear career goals come employee growth, which can lead to higher job satisfaction and improved retention.
By enabling your employees to set clear career goals, they can feel more confident in their own growth and future with your company.
Ready to invest in your employee’s career goals? Check out SkillsWave to see how you can easily encourage your staff to set career goals and define personalized learning paths with the courses needed to get them there, right at their fingertips.