Personal Development Plan Creation: How to Set Career Goals

A personal development plan (or PDP) is a set of actionable steps you can take to achieve both personal and career goals.

This sort of goal-setting revolves around identifying milestones you hope to reach in both your professional and personal life. You then work backward to see how you can get from where you are now to where you’d hope to be. The timescale you decide on for each of these goals is entirely up to you.

Personal development objectives can include learning hard or soft skills for your career, improving your physical and mental health, or investing in personal relationships. By comparing your progress against your initial plan, you unlock a valuable means of self-assessment to see where you’re at in your trajectory of becoming the person you hope to be someday.

Developing an action plan to achieve your personal and professional goals comes with a wide array of potential benefits. Here are just three to consider:

• Better defined purpose: When you decide on an end goal—your “why”— in any pursuit, it becomes far easier to target your current lifestyle and daily habits to achieve that purpose. A personal development plan template helps you define several ultimate objectives so you can cater each aspect of your daily life to reaching them as soon as you see fit.
• Increased clarity: Whether throughout your career path or simply in your personal life, having development goals helps you gain clarity about who you are now and who you want to be. It’s much easier to prioritize tasks and projects when you know where you want to be in five years time than if you have no future plans whatsoever.
• More actionable steps forward: With personal development goals and time management skills, you can craft a concrete strategy to move past your current situation into a better one. Personal development plans set long-term goals and lay out more achievable milestones to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Once you translate your personal development goals into an actionable plan, you pave the way for your future success. Keep these seven tips in mind as you draft a personal development plan of your own:

1. 1. Ask for input. Personal development opportunities are all around us, and our loved ones and colleagues are usually more than happy to help us find them. Ask trusted advisors about what goals you should set for yourself on a professional and personal level, as well as how you could best achieve them. Measure their advice against your own intuition in periods of self-reflection.
2. 2. Assess your strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has a different set of unique competencies as well as a host of things they can improve. Perform a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat anlaysis—or SWOT analysis—to get a general idea of where you currently thrive and where you could use more work. You can always further improve your strengths and overcome your weaknesses—all it takes is effort and prior planning.
3. 3. Define your value set. To better set well-suited personal development goals, you should know what you value most in the first place. When you know what you want and need, it’s far easier to motivate yourself to acquire the new skills necessary to achieve those things. Take a minute to ask yourself what gets you out of bed in the morning to better crystallize your value set.
4. 4. Prioritize your objectives. As you start to write out your personal development plan, you’ll start to notice you have many different goals for different aspects of your life. In order to get the most out of your plan, try to prioritize your objectives. For example, perhaps you decide you’d rather return to higher education than pursue career development in your current field. It helps to focus on one thing at a time rather than juggle everything all at once.
5. 5. Give yourself grace. As you try to reach measurable milestones and upskill, it can be easy to get into a pattern of self-criticism. Remember to give yourself grace. Do your best to put the brakes on any negative self-talk. Self-improvement is hard work, and it can take quite some time before you achieve long-term goals. Along the way, try to be your own biggest cheerleader rather than your own biggest critic.
6. 6. Look at each area of your life. Try to balance your personal and professional life when crafting your development plan. Keep in mind there are many transferable skills from one sphere to the next. Still, it’s helpful to try to craft goals distinctly for each part of your life and then prioritize them as you see fit.
7. 7. Set short-term and long-term goals. Do your best to set short-term goals on your way to achieving long-term ones. Consider your starting point and end goal, and try to build a gradual and achievable plan to get from one point to the next. Use whatever kind of time frame works best for you personally. Consider using a SMART goals template (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals) when coming up with ideal milestones for yourself.

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