Achieving your Long-Term Career Goals Is A Process

If you’re anything like the typical young or middle-aged American professional, chances are you don’t want to stay in your current job forever. You see your present place of employment as only a stepping stone to bigger, better things, goals that you’ve dreamt about since college or even before that.

The sad truth is that many of us settle into a job and forget about our dreams of going to law school, writing a novel, or moving overseas. On the other side of the coin, some are so eager to pursue what they “really want to be doing,” that they shrug off their current employment as a worthless pursuit, and so they under perform as a result. They think, “This isn’t what I was made to do, so why bother?” Both attitudes—while opposite—are incredibly misguided.

If you’ve got big dreams—great. Ambition is often the key to success, and not everybody has strong ambition, so the worst thing to do would be to squander it. But, at the same time, ambition means nothing if you can’t carefully plan both your short and long term career goals.

The key to sticking by your long-term dreams is to see the path to those dreams as a process and not an end. If your goal is to become a published author, you need to understand that a steady job is absolutely necessary in an economic climate that has never—for the most part—supported full-time writing careers. That means that excelling at your present job is a must—you’ll need to earn the livelihood in order to support yourself as you work on your writing.

An acquaintance of mine, whose long-term career goals are to one day run for public office, has lately fallen into the trap of dismissing her current position as a school office administrator.  While politics and office work are not directly linked, it’s important to think of everything as a process.

So even if you think your work right now is so far from the job you eventually want to pursue, you should ask yourself, “How will my current job, no matter how seemingly unrelated, help me develop skills that I’ll need when I do begin pursuing my dreams?” My friend’s job does indeed involve skills necessary in politics; she constantly has to be talking to people, addressing complaints, and performing damage control. And that’s exactly what an elected official does every single day in office.

The key to paving the way to your goals is excelling in everything you do. In order to get a better job, one that you’re more passionate about, you’ll have to develop a good track record, since references often play a much bigger role in landing new work than you’d think. If you can’t handle the small tasks, then moving on to a more stimulating job will be impossible. Remember—career success is all about the process.

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This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online universities .  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87@gmail.com .