Short-term career goals aim to improve skills and knowledge in a specific organization, while also preparing for future job transitions. Career counselors suggest achieving short-term goals before focusing on long-term ones, but long-term planning may not always pay off due to rapidly changing industries. Successful career planning involves aligning interests with various industries and job definitions for a rewarding career journey.
Short-term career goals are attempts to improve performance and skills in a specific organization, with the idea of increasing the marketability of skills in that specific business arena. These objectives may include improvements such as increasing understanding of how the organization works and improving one’s internal knowledge and education. Externally, short-term career goals also include a focus on financial stability with the intention of preparing to transition into other long-term work environments. This not only means saving money for potential periods of unemployment, but also determining where applications of one’s experience would be most profitable and where strong job growth is likely in the future.
Career counselors suggest that short-term career goals need to be achieved before focusing on long-term goals. Entry-level jobs are seen as a stepping stone to the long-term career goal of evaluating rival companies, other industries where qualifications would apply, or higher positions in the current company. While this is logical, career goal setting often works in the opposite direction. One must first define a long-term career plan before it is possible to excel at any short-term career goals.
Long-term career planning is a useful first step to succeeding with short-term career goals, but that doesn’t guarantee that such planning will pay off. Low-wage, indentured, and underemployed workers, especially those with higher education and extensive experience in a field, are often criticized for being “bums” who have failed to make plans for long-term career goals. The blame cannot be placed entirely on faulty career planning; however, as industries change rapidly in the modern industrialized world, career aspirations that took years to prepare may become obsolete by the time someone is ready to enter the job market in this field.
Work and career goals tend toward extremes. Long-term career goals are viewed in an overly optimistic light, imagining the possibility of reaching great heights in an organization’s hierarchy or developing specialized skills just by “putting in the time” for the employer. On the other hand, short-term career goals are often pessimistically viewed as the “hard work” needed to get where we really want to be.
Short-term employment need not be just a means to an end or survival, or, in the long run, an unattainable fantasy. Most experienced career counselors point out that successful career planning views short-term goals as just one point on a spectrum that includes overall life goals. Determining a career path based on the interests you want to specialize in, rather than job titles and roles, gives you more flexibility with real-world conditions. Fitting professional aspirations to a variety of industries, corporate structures, and related job definitions, including independent and independent options, makes it possible to see work as a variety of opportunities. Career steps can be an all-time rewarding journey, rather than many years of hard work, rewarded in the end with the ideal job.
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