Goal setting for the professional in you

As a young professional, goal setting (and achieving!) has proven to be one of my greatest assets. However, it didn’t come easy at first. It was during my days in college when I learned to master the art of goal setting. Or so I thought. Transitioning into the “real world,” I quickly realized that goal setting in college is much different than setting goals in Corporate America.

In college, it was simple. I set measurable and achievable goals revolving around exams, papers, and my GPA. I set social goals, athletic goals, and the occasional project-based goal related to my organizations and clubs. Through academics and athletics in particular, I learned to measure my progress against clear outcomes - bad and good grades or wins and losses. Achieving academic and athletic goals is something I’ve learned to do for the majority of my early life.

Working for a Fortune 500 company right out of college, I quickly (and painfully) realized that the goals I was setting (good salary, promotions, compensation, etc) didn’t make tangible sense. I was stuck in my college mindset and completely overlooking the most important part of setting goals as a young professional – setting goals for the organization, not just for myself. After experimenting with this, it became clear that aligning my goals to benefit the company would ultimately put me in the best position to achieve my own goals as well. Sounds simple, but this was a life-changing realization that motivated me to learn more about goal setting as a young professional.

I came across SMART goals first. This well-known method was useful, but not what I was looking for. I continued my search and found a method that I had first learned about in Business School. It’s called the SWOT Analysis and has become my main goal setting strategy ever since.

A word of advice for the young professional in you. The SWOT Analysis is a planning tool used to evaluate key Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that can contribute to the overall success or failure of your goal. By doing a SWOT Analysis on your goals, you’ll gain insights on your strengths and weaknesses. You’ll become more efficient at targeting opportunities and avoiding threats. Check out the SWOT Analysis below:

Strengths: key attributes that will help you achieve your set goal or objective (ambition, knowledge, support, etc.)

Weaknesses: key attributes that can potentially prevent you from achieving your set goal or objective (inexperience, lack of industry insight, mastery over the objective, etc.)

Opportunities: external factors that can be helpful to achieving your set goal or objective (relationships, market size, your firm’s well established reputation, etc.)

Threats: external factors that can be potentially detrimental to achieving your set goal or objective (competitors, certain global and economic factors, etc.)

Utilizing the SWOT Analysis has always allowed me to size up and achieve my goals as a young professional in the most constructive and well-informed way. By gaining a keen understanding of both internal and external factors relating to my goal and how it relates to my job, I have been able to push myself to set even bigger goals while delivering even bigger results at the same time.

Joseph Lamendola