Long-Term Career Goals: Why Are Long-Term Goals Important?

Long-term career goals are the professional goals you set for yourself over the duration of your working life. There is no metric for what constitutes a long-term career goal. For some people, these goals may reflect where they want to be on their career path within one year. For others, that duration might be five years. Some workers do not set deadlines for their long-term goals, but still know what kinds of job titles, accolades, and career milestones they wish to accrue by the end of their working life.

Long-term career goals stand in contrast to short-term career goals. Short-term goals typically involve more immediate achievements like getting a raise, nailing a job interview, getting a great performance review, or hitting a sales goal by the end of the quarter. Short-term goals can also be ambitious, like making a career change or starting your own business; they just take place in a more compressed time frame.

Setting career goals, both long-term and short-term, and thinking about what you want to achievefus is a natural function of human psychology. Striving for self-improvement can involve learning new skills, making more money, or holding more prestigious job titles. When thinking of future professional aspirations, it can be helpful to identify and lay out long-term career development goals, so you can work towards achieving them in a more thought-out way. By setting long-term career goals, you can:

• Make a career plan: Setting goals is the starting point of an action plan that can lead you from your current job to one that pays better, is more prestigious, and better aligns with your personal interests.
• Improve abilities: The key to reaching many professional goals is improving your existing skillset. In the process of advancing your career, you may decide to pick up new abilities such as public speaking, accounting, software development, and logistics management. These will likely prove handy in any future work environment.
• Develop leadership skills: In many business scenarios, career development means taking on a leadership role. Setting career goals can force you to develop the skills that leadership positions require.
• Merge career goals with personal goals: Career growth often aligns with personal growth. When you make more money, you may be able to afford new luxuries like homeownership or parenthood. A new job can also let you move to a new location—an appealing prospect for many workers.
• Build a professional network: Advancing your career may mean networking with people you don’t know in your current job. People who’ve set long-term career goals and identified their dream job can follow up by meeting with recruiters, attending industry seminars, and meeting new people whose work experience aligns with their new professional goals. This new network will come in handy when you begin a job search and truly delve into switching careers.

Here are some specific goals that a professional might aspire to as they look ahead in their career.

1. 1. A promotion within your current company: For some people, long-term goals involve ascending to a management position within their current company. This professional development goal can be measured by both a future job title and a future job description.
2. 2. Earning a certain salary: Some workers measure career success by their salaries. They can set an ideal salary in their mind and then make it their business to earn that salary—or more.
3. 3. Starting your own business: Some professionals view long-term success through the lens of no longer having a boss. These people aim to become business owners in their own right, working for themselves and embracing an entrepreneurial lifestyle.
4. 4. Peer recognition: Some people view long-term success through the lens of industry approbation. They might strive to win a professional accolade, be deemed a thought leader, or be inaugurated into a trade group’s hall of fame.
5. 5. Improving a skill set: One particularly useful goal is improving your skills and know-how in a particular competency. Depending on the skill, this can be a long-term or a short-term project. Workers may seek to improve their time management skills, communication skills, problem-solving abilities, or project management abilities. These are effectively performance goals, and through a combination of hard work and mentoring from fellow team members, can often be attainable.

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