Turning Goals into Action
With the knowledge you’ve gained thus far reflecting on your study abroad experience, taking stock of key KSAs employers value, and leveraging your growth mindset, let’s talk about how you can now set tangible goals to advance your career action.
A common method of goal setting is being “SMART” about it. The SMART rule states that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. Using the SMART goal framework will help you create clear objectives and a plan to take proactive steps toward your professional development.
Making Goals SMART
Simply stating a goal can feel vague or overwhelming. Using the SMART framework can help break your goals down and give you a roadmap of how to achieve them. Let’s look at each aspect of the SMART framework using learning a new language as the goal.
- Specific: What exactly do you want to do? Learn a language? What language? Will you use the new language in conversation only, or do you want to read and write it too?
- Measurable: How will you measure your success? What level of language learning will you consider as achieving your goal? Enough to get around on a two-week holiday or fluent enough to take courses while studying abroad?
- Attainable: Do you have the resources to reach this goal? Do you need internet access, funds set aside, time in your schedule, childcare while you study, or access to a native speaker?
- Relevant: Will this goal get you where you want to go? Will achieving this goal get you closer to your larger career goals?
- Timely: How much time will it take to accomplish this goal? Set a timeline you can stick to. Is it reasonable to become fluent in a new language in three weeks? Maybe if you already have significant language skills, but not if you are starting from “hello.”
To start your goal-setting journey, follow these steps:
- Select Your Goal: We are going to focus on the intercultural development goals you listed in the previous activity, but this method can be used for a career goal or another type of personal or academic goal.
- Break down the Goal using the SMART framework: Think of this as taking smaller chunks of a big project and doing them step by step. This is an important thing to keep in mind as you develop your goals. Something may be too ambitious by itself, but broken down into separate steps, it is much less intimidating and achievable.
What do SMART goals look like?
To give you an idea of how setting goals may look, let’s look at another example: diverse teamwork skills.
What is the goal you want to achieve and why?
Goal: Enhance intercultural skills required to work across difference in a diverse work team.
What are the objectives you can set to achieve this?
Specific: Sign up for the “Who Do You Think You Are?: Identity and Unconscious Bias at Work” course online.
Measurable: Complete all four modules of the course and earn the “Diversity Skills in the Workplace” microcredential.
Achievable: The course takes about 4 hours to complete, and I have reserved one hour per week in my schedule for four weeks.
Relevant: At a previous job, I was told a proven ability to work successfully in diverse teams would be an asset, and this course has this as a learning outcome.
Timely: The course has continuous enrollment, and if I register now and complete it in four weeks, I can share my learnings and credentials in time for my next round of co-op job interviews.
As you can see from this example, an overall goal of enhancing skills to work in diverse teams by itself can be too broad or vague, but by breaking it down into smaller components, you now have a framework in which this becomes much more manageable.
Learning Activity: How SMART are your goals?
Now that you’ve learned how to select a goal and break down that goal using the SMART framework, let’s revisit the three intercultural goals you identified in the last activity.
Download and complete the How SMART are your goals? Worksheet [DOCX] to turn your three intercultural goals into SMART goals.
