How to Achieve Long-Term Personal and Career Goals?

source: glassdoor

As fresh graduates, students are often confused about what career to pursue. Even if they clear this first step, it is usually in their late 20s when they start to realise their long-term goals.

The more you delay defining the set of objectives you want to achieve, the more difficult it becomes to realise them as the savings process gets deferred further. Here, we have discussed some SMART long-term goals for work with examples. Explore what changes they can bring to your life and understand how to approach them for timely fulfilment.

Long-term goals for work consist of career milestones you wish to accomplish within 3-5 years down the line. Depending on your current job designation, this target can get stretched for a more prolonged period.

Setting long-term career goals will keep you motivated while you grind in the same workspace daily. Therefore to boost your productivity, it is necessary to set realistic long-term goals and work incessantly towards achieving them.

When you sit to summarise long-term personal goals for work, you generally assess your professional standpoint and set sensible financial targets which you wish to reach within a specified time. For example, your personal goal from a financial perspective is to buy a new home as soon as possible. Such a manifestation needs to be more specific.

Without a clear-cut plan, chances are immensely high that you will be demotivated to save the whole amount at a time and give up on your dreams. Instead, a perfect personal long-term goal can be buying a 3 BHK apartment by saving a specific percentage of the down payment amount within 5 years provided you have assessed everything considering the inflation.

Similarly, you can look for other examples of long-term personal goals to attain clarity and make your career decisions accordingly. Additionally, defining the objectives on paper gives you more financial freedom as you feel more in control of your resources.

Here we have listed the most popular examples of long-term goals for work. Some of these are reasonably expected to fall within your bucket list too.

• Pursue a career of your dreams
• Become an expert at your job
• Grab an advanced level certificate in your aspired field
• Buy your own property
• Become debt-free
• Save ample retirement corpus to build an income substitute
• Save for child’s education
• Go on a long awaited vacation
• Invest in different classes of assets
• Learn new skills and ways to monetise them
• Live abroad
• Become a millionaire

Besides these long-term goals, there are many other common objectives too noticed among people worldwide, irrespective of their culture. Some of these include improving one’s own level of fitness, becoming a better parent, etc. But we have only included those long-term goals in the list that are strongly related to a monetary perspective.

1. Long-Term Goals Help You to Work With Determination

2. Setting Up Methodical Objectives Helps to Define Success

Precise, measurable and time-bound objectives are a concrete benchmark for tracking your career progress. Therefore combining these short-term roadmaps with long-term goals helps deliver clarity on what success should look like to you. 

Suppose you work as an online marketer for an automobile company where you intend to upsurge their sales volume quickly. Though it is a goal, it needs to be more well-defined. Instead, it will help if you aim to increase the sales revenue by 10% by the end of the current quarter. The latter scenario defines success for you and your organisation and is more likely to be accomplished as the whole marketing team will plan accurately.

3. You Are Able to Make Better Decisions

It is crucial to develop a plan for any of the previously discussed examples of long-term personal goals. This is because it will give rise to simple decision-making scenarios at personal and administrative levels. 

For example, you work as a banker where the institution aims to provide ultimate customer satisfaction to its clientele. When the net connectivity goes down, you can take the necessary steps to work towards the broader goal instead of turning down the requests and simply waiting for the right situation. Therefore long-term goals direct you at certain times when you reach points where choosing a step entirely offsets the alternative option.

4. You Stay Motivated at Work

Establishing long-term goals requires executing specific steps, which we have mentioned below:

Step 1: Be specific about your desires and goals. The chances of achieving them will improve if you are more unhesitating about them. For instance, the goal of becoming a corporate supervisor after finishing an MBA is more precise than just aiming to grab any job position that companies will offer in on-campus interviews.

Step 2: Ensure you are on track while chasing a dream. It will require reviewing the benchmark periodically and assessing whether you have achieved everything within the set period. If not, then it will be vital to measure the percentage of target activities you have covered.

Step 3: Create favourable situations to boost your confidence while chasing objectives. To ensure such an environment make sure your long-term personal and career goals are achievable.

Step 4: Review the jotted-down goals to ensure whether they are practical or not. Suppose it seems impossible to achieve within a reasonable timeframe; you probably need to wait before planning a course of action. On the other hand, if you feel confident about achieving them, look for ways most likely to arrange necessary resources before the due date.

Now, as you have gained an idea about the step-by-step process of how to set realistic long-term goals, refer to these tips to understand how you may quickly achieve them:

• List your financial goals
• Go for smaller sub-goals to feel more in control
• Do not chase many goals at a time
• Consider investing in individual SIPs to fund your goals
• Develop habits of fulfilling significant achievements
• Celebrate your success with family and friends

Even after thoroughly understanding long-term goals for work with examples, achieving them becomes difficult if you do not stay disciplined in the goal-hunting process. Besides planning for reasonable feats, you should never adopt a roadmap that will likely affect your career interests. Therefore we advise you to follow the discussed steps and refer to popular books and money management resources if you aim to master financial wellness soon.