Do you have quantifiable career objectives?

Everyone keeps harping on the need to have career objectives because if you allow your career to drift on the quirks of fate, destiny and providence, the consequences can be uncertain and hazardous. People do set objectives but do not focus on evaluating them, as a result of which, they are unable to discern if their career is on the right track and whether they are moving forward to achieve their objectives. Therefore, the need to have objectives that are quantifiable cannot be overemphasised.

You need to have set career objectives – they could be tall and grand or small and subtle. But prior to setting any objectives, you need to know precisely what you seek to do for a career. This is indeed a challenging task, particularly for youngsters. When some people are out selecting their career and wanting to take up engineering, medicine, sports or any other pursuit as a career, there are many more who have absolutely no clue about what they want to opt for. Therefore, setting career objectives is vital as a maiden action. It is immaterial if you want to become the vice-president of a multinational company or representing you country in hockey. What is critical to planning your professional future is setting career objectives.

There is no decision that does not have a possibility of peril attached to it. When you make a career plan, you do so to cover about four decades of your life and cater to various risks that are entailed. With the world being in a state of flux and new scientific advancements taking place, the perils and hazards associated with your career stand increased enormously.

While all career planning is invariably a decision that extends into the long term, alterations that take place in the employment milieu are always short-term. Considering this fact, you can make a sound career decision if you comprehend the need to be update your skills on a continual basis and also go through some pressures, difficulties and adverse exposures. An assessment of risks involved in your career decisions helps you to preclude mediocre decisions and impassioned strain. Therefore, your career plans ought to recognise specific talents and skills that you can envision. You also need to foresee various expenditures and different life events, positive or negative as you move ahead in life because they will impact your career decisions.

There will also be some risks about which you can do nothing at the moment, not even planning to deal with them. You cannot rule out altered milieus or your retrenchment and ill-health; but you should have the dynamism to accept such risks and be fully geared up to make appropriate responses in the least possible time.

It is essential that you are able to determine the degree and quantum of progress made in your move towards your objectives. You can experience a spectacular rise and become the vice president of your company after putting in about a decade of service; under such a situation you will be able to gauge your progress. But in case you are rising up at a steady pace, your progress will be classically less recognisable. In most cases and more often than not, career advancements are relatively protracted and more systematic. The single important action is to gauge your progress because sans it, you will not be able to accomplish any of your objectives.

If you happen to miss out on achieving any of them, it would call for immediate serious contemplation. You will have to find out whether your objectives were not pragmatic or if you had deficiencies or whether your efforts were not commensurate. Your findings will provide you information that will facilitate making midterm corrections to get back on rails.

But what happens if your career objectives are not sharp and precise? Perhaps then you will have to make adjustments and enunciate your objectives all over again. Remember that in the absence of any capability to quantify and trail them, your career objectives are nothing but imaginings and castles built in the air.

When you make attempts to gauge your progress, besides discerning positive results, you will automatically get to be aware of your shortfalls. The shortfalls will highlight the need to undergo additional training, gather more experience or work harder still.

Most career objectives, including the best of them are mere proclamations about what you intend doing with your professional life. Your career objectives could well entail intricate ups and downs or spirals and drops in your move forward towards for attaining them. The point to note is that the enormity of your objectives in no way repudiates the need to measure your progress.

Considering all the above explanations, you must set quantifiable career objectives for yourself. The requirement of objectives being quantifiable is more significant than the objectives per se. But if your objectives are arcane and unfeasible, your capacity and capability to measure them will be subject to contesting.