Guide to Creating Goals

Growth happens organically every day, but it isn’t always in the direction you want to be growing in. Having good goals will help you to clarify intent and plan advancement. Here are some tips to ensure your goals are working to help drive your growth.

Do gap analysis

The first thing to consider is your current state and also your desired state: maybe you are looking for an entry level job, or you are already progressing in your career and want to step up to the next level. My tip is to look at job postings for your desired state and consider the question “what things are listed here that I cannot sufficiently evidence today?“.

Let’s take for example a web development role I found posted online which states: “Web developers should know Java, Python, CSS, and HTML”. You can now perform gap analysis between what you can sufficiently evidence today and where you have some work to do. In our hypothetical example, let’s suppose you have a simple web page online to showcase a portfolio of work which demonstrates good use of CSS and HTML, but no Java or Python work you can share. Your goals should result in evidence of Java and Python knowledge.

For more senior roles, you might have to demonstrate coaching and mentoring skills or instances where you have implemented some process improvements. Here, you can look at your previous work for the things you can evidence and remove them from your list. Maybe you have recently onboarded a new team member and have great examples of coaching and mentoring but are lacking the process improvement component. Your goals should be to implement some process improvements resulting in a good ROI.

It’s important to remember that having done something isn’t the same as being able to evidence it. If you informally helped a colleague progress an item of work and didn’t track that work, mentioning it at a promotion interview possibly isn’t going to reflect as well as you’d hope. It’s always best to stick to demonstrable items - even if it’s something you can do in your sleep but isn’t supported by evidence, add it to your goal list, it should be a nice quick win.

Use SMART goals

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. SMART goals are well described in a great many places online already so I won’t go over them in any depth here, other than to say “specific” and “measurable” will lead to exactly the type of evidence we are looking for to help drive our growth.

“Attainable” and “relevant” can sometimes be harder to nail, hopefully the next tip will help overcome any challenges here.

Look for opportunities

Most of us work from a backlog of some description, whether it’s a fully specified project or a vague strategy of implementing customer ERs and fixing bugs. We want to find where the planned work overlaps with our SMART goals. Take care however - don’t couple the goals to the work, as this will see goals fail if the work priorities shift.

For example, if you have to evidence working knowledge of Java, and if the backlog contains some work to implement a customer data processor which could be done in Java, then an opportunity for this goal exists. The goal remains to evidence working knowledge of Java however - it doesn’t shift to “implement a customer data processor in Java”. This way, if the planned work changes, the goal is still achievable provided the newly prioritised work can be completed in Java.

Think ahead

Achieving goals like these is the same as building an evidence bank, if you can stretch your goal a little to give you an advantage later, take it! You might be in an entry-level role looking to move into a mid-level role, but you know one day you want to push up to a more senior role, then start thinking about what you might need to evidence then.

If you have a goal to learn a technology that’s new to you, have a stretch goal to share with your team. If you have a goal to setup something for the first time, have a stretch goal to automate the process for the next person so you can evidence process improvement. Now, when you need evidence of team building or considering business needs, you can point to a strong history of considering these things. Being able to demonstrate that this has always been part of your working practices will help you stand out ahead of the crowd.

Examples

Most goals are essentially either a technical knowledge or skills gap, or business improvements. As such, they can almost always be moulded into one of these formats.

Technical knowledge / skills gap & knowledge sharing

There are three components to addressing these gaps

• gaining required knowledge
• evidencing that learning is being applied to benefit customers
• sharing knowledge so the whole team benefits

You want to make sure there is at least 1 Key Performance Indicator for each.

An example goal:

Description: Knowlege of Java is currently limited. This puts our capabilities to develop working products for our customers at risk, and so it is essential that we continue to learn and grow our technical skills in order to be able to contribute fully to the solution.

Target date	KPIs
End of sprint 1	Have completed Getting Started with Java course.
End of sprint 2	Complete Java basics knowledge sharing session with other team members.
End of sprint 2	Ensure that all team members have the Java code setup correctly on their local machines and can at a minimum run up the unit tests and see the results.
End of quarter 1	Have contributed to Java code base by making code commits to the solution each sprint through the quarter with increasing frequency.

Continuous improvements

When considering improvements, opportunities are going to be unknown to us at the point of goal setting as these are reactive to issues discovered. As such, it is important to aim for consistency and positive ROI on efforts instead of specific instances of improvements.

An example goal:

Description: Our company is positioned as a market leader in our area, and in order to maintain that position all teams must continue to improve and raise the bar as far as possible. We need to track our continuous improvement initiatives and it is important that all team members contribute to this endeavour.

Target date	KPIs
End of quarter 1	Team meet weekly to discuss outstanding issues and agree on next-steps to progress.
End of quarter 1	You are implementing effective solutions to problems raised with a defensible ROI on a month-by-month basis.