Step one in accomplishing anything is having a goal

We recently had a meeting regarding our individual career progression. The discussion started out trying to determine if we are getting adequate feedback on our performance and progress and whether our mentors and supervisors are helping us make progress.

Apparently we all have different ideas of what progress means. By and large, people associated progress with more money and promotions. I suppose that is the idea most people have when you talk about making progress career-wise, but the fact is, many if not most engineers will not be promoted beyond a journeyman engineer (where I currently am) because basically the only promotions available are to management positions.

So we had to take another step back and define what progress is. In the scope of the work we do in our current office, it is clearly becoming more knowledgeable of the system and getting the technical work done more efficiently. But in the broader scope of things, progress could mean many different things. For some, that is all the progress that they desire – being content with the current situation and just becoming more proficient. For others, progress might be gaining a management position or a project lead or becoming the technical lead on something. For others, progress might be getting a graduate degree, and for others progress might be finding a new engineering job, and still for others it may be finding a new career that is more interesting.

So we had to take another step back to define what our goals are because we can’t measure progress unless we have a goal in mind. At this point we realized that many of us don’t have clear goals and therefore cannot accurately measure progress.

So we had to take one more step back and see if we can help each other, along with our first level supervisor, determine our goals. Do you know what your goals are? Are you actively working toward them? Or are you mindlessly going through the motions without much idea for what you want out of your career? This all in terms of careers but the same thing can be said for personal/life goals. Hopefully there is some but not too much overlap between career and personal goals.