#GOALS

I love the saying that our generation has come up with “hashtag goals!” when someone achieves something they would really like to achieve themselves. But girl, do you know you can make whatever that “hashtag goal” is a reality for yourself too? You just have to be willing to commit to putting in the work.

Last week, my boss and I had a discussion about my career goals. Much of our discussion was around this year’s goals and a few longer term goals that will complete mid to late next year. In our goal setting, the employee creates their desired goals and the manager helps guide these to larger company goals and measurables. What I enjoy is that I don’t feel pressured to meet a certain goal that I don’t feel supports my career development.

Let me explain what I mean by this:

I have a title of Business Development Engineer (BDE). All previous BDEs have been designated to allocate their time to X% of project work for our team while reporting to the commercial staff as their main role. I wanted this title, but this aspect of the job quite honestly puzzled me. Why should I work on projects when the main goal of what I do is creating tools and executing technical tasks designated by my manager?

I have a majority of my years as a project engineer, so project work is not “difficult” per se, but the tasks associated with project work are not in alignment with how I plan to grow in my career. I can do the paperwork; I know who to ask if I’m truly stumped; I recognize things that I don’t know and bring them to the attention of others; I can manage a project successfully so it completes on time… but repeatedly doing these tasks have little to no impact on the direction I plan to take my career. I flat out told my manager that based on my direction, I felt it was not necessary.

He agreed (with a small caveat that I can totally live with) and even supported that my career development was not taking me in that direction as well.

Here’s what I wasn’t ready for:

I am often surprised at the results when I take my own advice which just goes to show that my framework is definitely repeatable: ask for what you want. After I had presented my goals and my boss agreed, I wanted to be candid and discuss where I wanted to go next. My philosophy is that comfort zones is where your career goes to die. I’ve had a really comfortable few months in this role, but now it’s time to push some boundaries to create some momentum to the next level.

I let him know that future state I would really like to manage some of our services offerings based on the way the renewable energy market is growing. He agreed with the fact that there is a lot of growth happening in our industry and could definitely see that 3-5 years in the future – possibly sooner if our industry starts to grow more rapidly. He let me know that my career goals would be communicated to the appropriate parties so that they can be taken into consideration when the need arises.

“I asked for what I wanted.”

Now, it’s time to level-up to prove that I really am working toward this effectively. All this is to say, don’t just focus on your short term goals but also communicate your long term goals, even if you’re in a new position. You won’t get anywhere by looking backwards, so it’s best you keep putting one foot in front of the other with intention and really taking the wheel for your career. It’s your life. How are you finding happiness in it?

-Rachel