Goals for Professional Development (5 Types of Goals with Examples)

Are you looking to advance your career to develop your career and you're wondering what are the types of goals that you can set as a professional? In this video, I'm going to cover the five types of goals that you can set for professional development and give you some examples of what you can do for different types of goals. So if that's what you're looking for, stay tuned in this video. I got some awesome stuff for you. Hi, welcome back to the channel. My name is Ben Preston, author of Harness Your Butterflies and creator of the Career Accelerator program, helping professionals just like you to create the career that you've always wanted. If you're new to the channel and you're interested in professional development and career advice, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And without further ado, let's jump into the video. Okay, I'm going to break this video out into a couple different sections. So the first section that I want to talk about are what are the goals or what are the types of goals, the categories of goals for professional development. Now, you might just think, oh, they're just career goals. But really, when you think about professional development, you're thinking about all of the contributing goals that you can set for yourself that will advance your career. And it's not just thinking I need to attend this conference, I need to go to these seminars. There's a lot of other things that come into play. So what are the five categories? First, you have your career goals. Where do you want to get professionally? Do you want to have a certain job title? Do you want to work in a certain area? Do you want to be an expert in a certain function? What are your types of career ambitions that you have for yourself? So that's the first category. And I'll go into examples of what types of career goals you might be setting for yourself later on in the video. But that's the first category. The second is relationship goals. So what are your goals that you have for partnerships with other people? It might be your significant other, but it might just be I want to be more outgoing with people, or I want to have more fun at work events, or whatever that looks like. I'm going to get into examples of what relationship goals look like in a second, but that's the second category. The third category doesn't apply to everyone, but if you are a parent, the third one is parenting goals. How does your parenting interact with your professional development? The fourth category is personal development. So what are the things that you want to accomplish outside of work? And lastly, it's financial goals. What are the things that you want to accomplish financially? Do you want to pay off certain debts? Do you want to be able to afford certain things? Do you want to have a certain quality of life? Do you want to, you know, what are those types of financial goals? So those are the five types of goals that that are part of your professional development, and now I want to talk about how they interact with each other. Now on the surface, you might think all of these goals have nothing to do with professional development, and what I'm going to say is your professional development, your advancement of your professional goals, your career ambitions, all of it ladders back to these different categories or elements of your life. You can't just look at your career in a silo. You kind of have to say, okay, what are my goals going to be across the board, and what are the, how are those going to contribute to my professional development? So think about the goals that we just said, the five categories, as let's just say your general life categories. There might be more things that you want to do in your life, but these are the five that are going to actively drive or shape the way that you develop your career professionally. And the reason that we talk about them comprehensively is because when you start looking at goals, you want to make sure that you're setting them or your primary goals all together so that they're impacting each other and kind of moving your career forward at a really pleasant velocity or, you know, positive momentum so that you're not stagnant or forgetting about one part of your life and feeling like you don't have that work-life balance. So let's jump into what examples of these types of goals might look for your professional development specifically. So I'm going to be reading these because I have them written down, but just to kind of give you an idea. So first we're going to talk about your career goals. What are some examples of career goals that might benefit your professional development? Okay, so some examples of this might be things like improving your communication skills to get a better rapport with your co-workers or clients, learning new technology to be able to work on the latest software, websites, apps. This is if you're functional, functionally, you need to understand the latest technology. Setting long-term goals of pursuing additional education, setting short-term goals of attending seminars or workshops or things like that. You might want to network with key stakeholders. You might want to attend a conference or a trade show where you can meet new people to catch up on the latest trends. So that's just examples of career goals that you can set that will help your professional development. Okay, the second thing that we want to talk about is relationship goals. So here are some examples of what relationship goals might be in relation to your professional development. You might want to improve your relationships with your family by spending more time or setting aside, let me try that again, setting aside time to spend with your family. So you're actively saying I want to increase my relationship with my family, therefore I need to monitor my time at work. You might want to learn communication skills so that you can better resolve conflicts within your relationship. So it might be something where I, you know, one of the things that I want to learn from a relationship standpoint is how to work through conflict better, and that might be something that's going to benefit you at work as well. You might want to become more empathetic. That might be something from a relationship standpoint if you're managing people, for example, that's going to be a huge one. You might want to meet new people and expand your network. Another one might be improving your listening skills and getting more engaged with others. You want, and then the last example that I have here is learning how to manage conflicts so that you have a more productive and healthy relationships. So more conflict management. Okay, so then let's talk about parenting goals, examples of parenting goals. You want to practice good self-care so that you can set an example for your children and live up to your expectations of yourself. You might want to set goals to manage stress so that you're not overwhelmed and that you can manage your work and your life. You might also want to improve communication skills with your children to resolve conflict and increasing stress, or set expectations for time allocations to ensure that you're able to meet the needs of your children while still fulfilling other goals. All right, so then let's talk through personal goals. You might want to improve your self-care goal like exercising, eating healthy. That might be something you want to do in your personal life that's going to impact your work. You might want to set goals for emotional and mental goals like learning how to manage stress, setting aside time for yourself, or even meditating if that's something that you are interested in doing. You might want to set more personal goals about volunteering and giving back. That's something you can integrate into your professional development as well. You want to set goals for your spirituality like attending daily or weekly church, synagogue, mosque services, and setting goals to explore hobbies or other things like painting, writing, reading books, or learning new instruments. A lot of these goals are things that you're going to be able to actually execute through work. One of the examples that we just talked about was volunteering. A lot of organizations have volunteering things or hours that you can go volunteer. So if you want to say, hey, I'm going to go volunteer once a month during the work day or even for a half day, that's something that some businesses allow as well. Okay, and then the last category that we had was financial goals. These are things like setting goals to manage debt. That's going to be a huge one. Learning to save money for the future. Increasing your income goals by learning new skills or side hustles. Preparing a business case for a promotional raise. If you want to work with your supervisor and say, hey, I have these financial goals. Do you think that this is possible with me working here? Or you might want to pursue goals of opening a business that will increase extra income down the road. So those are kind of the examples of the five different categories of how you can set goals and kind of how you can tie them back to your professional development. When it comes to communicating that professional development, this is going to be the last part of this video, is communicating with your supervisor. Hey, these are the goals that I have for myself. Let's figure out a way to work with this. So if you have things like parenting goals, that's going to be extremely easy to communicate with your supervisor and say, hey, I'm a parent of two kids. I have these other responsibilities just so you know, like the weekends are off limits for me. It's going to be a lot easier for you to establish those goals and enforce and communicate those up front. Other things that if you have other goals, let's say hobbies that you want to do, or time management things, or managing stress, or working with coworkers, building relationships with people, those are all things that you can communicate with your supervisor. You might not want to be super formal about them. You don't want to say, this is my goal and I'm going to be doing this, this, and this. It might just be something where you tell your supervisor, hey, I want to meet more people in the company. What's the best way for me to do that? And then figure out how you can do that at work and kind of get those things going. Or for example, we talked about the volunteering. That's an easy conversation with your supervisor as well. Promotions, that's the type of conversations that you can build into your professional development plan. All of this stuff's going to be super helpful when you're developing your professional development goals. And if you need some more examples, or if you want to just, if you want to reach out to me and say, hey, I'm still struggling with this, can you help me? Feel free to write me a comment below. I'll definitely respond and give you some ideas if you're still looking for examples of professional development goals. That's all I have. Hopefully this video was helpful. If you liked it, if you thought it was good, make sure to leave a comment below. Drop a thumbs up if you thought it was helpful. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. I have new videos every Tuesday. So I will see you on the next one.