What Are Short-Term Career Goals? (With 15 Examples)

Short-term career goals are meant to be achieved in the near future — within the next day, week or month. They can be used to help advance your career and move you toward a long-term career goal, serving as a roadmap taking you from where you are to where you want to be.

What Are Short-Term Goals? 

A short-term goal is a goal that you plan to achieve in the near future. It is measurable, focuses on what can be done right away and is intended to be easy to accomplish. This makes short-term goals helpful for getting quick results, sticking with certain habits and making larger goals more approachable. 

“A short-term goal should impact your day-to-day work and be easy to track and measure success,” said An Vu, chief marketing officer of Zynga’s Small Giant Games. 

One example of a short-term career goal could be to cut the average number of bugs in a software update by half. That goal is measurable and can be tracked. It would also positively affect your daily work.

Another example might be to learn a new professional skill, which you can measure by taking a course and receiving a completion certificate.

Examples of Short-Term Career Goals

Below, university career experts and executives, hiring managers and team leads from half a dozen tech companies offer advice for developing short-term career goals.

1. Determine What You Want Out of Your Career

“Your first goal might be just to figure out what it is that you want to do for your career. You should reflect on what you’ve done up until this point, what are your likes and dislikes and you should talk to other people who are in the roles or industries you are interested in.”

— Iteeah Pounds, internship and co-op program and operations manager at the Georgia Institute of Technology

2. Raise Your Performance Numbers

Performance numbers relate to meeting certain performance metrics or KPIs, such as the number of tasks completed, sales met or business revenue earned within a set deadline. Improving your performance numbers acts as a tangible short-term goal, and can contribute to a long-term goal like getting a promotion at your company.

3. Improve Your Writing, Speaking and Communication Skills

“When I was an engineer, I realized that delivering my work product on time wasn’t enough to get to the next level. I saw that having a good command of the written and spoken word was something I had to practice and master. English is not my first or second language and in college, when you major in a STEM field, practicing communication skills wasn’t what got you the ‘A.’ But, once you are working with business partners and peers, having awesome communication skills differentiates you from others. In the beginning, I watched a lot of TED talks and tutorials on YouTube. I created a framework for how good storytellers and online instructors communicated.”

— Aliza Carpio, technical evangelist director at Autodesk

4. Learn a New Competency or Concept

“Shifting from engineering to product was a big deal because I didn’t have the traditional business or finance background or competency like so many other product managers. I had to invest time and effort in learning about business models, financial mechanics and metrics, stakeholder management and research methodologies. I took online business courses and went to a local community college to learn basic finance. I also immersed myself in design thinking practice, which allowed me to become a design thinking coach for startups and use this practice in my daily work.”

— Carpio

5. Expand Your Industry and Tool Knowledge

“When I started at Asana, I knew that I really wanted to become an expert in the productivity tools space and an expert in the problems our enterprise users face. My teams are ultimately responsible for a lot of the retention and engagement of enterprise users. So, in the first few months, I made a short-term career goal to listen to at least one customer call in this space per week and at least one enterprise customer call per week. I also made it a goal to read through 10 random Net Promoter Score survey responses a week. Making that measurable and doable goal very early on was really helpful for me to understand the user and be very attuned to their needs and hear it from their own mouths. These short-term goals help my longer-term goal to become one of the world’s foremost experts and thinkers on how we can solve productivity problems for enterprise clients, organizations and teams.”

— Yasmin Kothari, product lead at Asana

6. Start an Extra Project

“I worked at a mobile game startup where I quickly moved up from intern to marketing manager. During my three years at this startup, I took on as many responsibilities as I could manage and made the effort to become proficient until I could build my professional capacity. Establishing my ability to accomplish basic tasks inspired confidence in others to provide more opportunities for me to engage meaningfully in the work. The short-term goals were learning experiences that built my capacity and established my credibility among peers which led to greater opportunities.”

— An Vu, chief marketing officer of Zynga’s Small Giant Games

7. Take on a Leadership Opportunity

“During the first five years of my career, I had great responsibilities as an individual contributor but no leadership experience. So as a way to gain that, I took on small projects that had touchpoints cross-functionally. You start to build a coalition of people around you who will support your ideas and promote them and also lend their skills and time to advance the goals that you have laid out.”

— Julie Lemieux, vice president of product experience at Sigma

8. Earn a New Certification or Degree

If you’re looking to get a promotion or change roles down the road, earning a new skill certification or relevant postgraduate degree can lend you a competitive edge to get there. Industry technologies and best practices are constantly changing, so engaging in continuous learning can help you keep up in your field and overall progress in your career.

9. Practice Work-Life Balance

Short-term goals can be used to practice work-life balance, which can help you progress to a long-term goal of improving your health, preventing burnout and boosting your productivity at work. This can look like setting a short-term goal of logging on and off at a specific time every day, or a goal of creating and following a weekly to-do list of responsibilities.

10. Build Your Professional Network

“Networking builds up your connections, which in turn may yield a resource for potential mentors, and people who you can job shadow or do informational interviews with to explore career options, as well as to bounce ideas off of to formulate short term goals. Joining professional trade groups can help you expand your network, as well as committing to meeting six new people within the next six months.”

— Pounds

11. Update Your Resume and Professional Portfolio

“Make sure your resume and LinkedIn profile are updated and ready to go. This way, when you want to connect with people who are in an area that you want to further explore they will want to connect with you. They can see that you know what you’re looking for.”

— Pounds

12. Find a Mentor

“Identify two or three people who exhibit exactly the thing that your long-term goal represents who could be your mentor. When you talk to that person, it’s really important to ask them for very tactical tips. You can say ‘I’m specifically interested in your expertise or skill in X,Y or Z. Can you tell me when you were starting out on this journey, what were a couple of things that you did early on that helped you get where you are today?’ Make your questions really tactical and specific so the person can give you the right tips.”

— Kothari

13. Get Promoted

“Getting a promotion is a very common short-term goal, where you say I want to be promoted into the role above me. If that’s your short-term goal, you need to figure out what you need to do to get promoted into that role, whether it’s through an annual performance review, your own volition, and set goals for yourself to achieve that promotion and record what you’re doing to service those goals you’ve set for yourself.”

— Sarah Sikowitz, director of career education and coaching at Harvard Business School’s Career and Professional Development department

14. Transition to a New Industry Or Field 

“I was in G.E. Healthcare and I wanted to make the transition to G.E. Aviation. I was really interested in some of the technologies that were coming out of aviation and was doing a lot of interesting things in digital aviation and 3D printing. I started networking with people in that particular business unit who were in my area of sales. Lo and behold, the networking that initially was self-serving actually ended up being very beneficial to my current business unit and we found all these amazing synergies that we weren’t exploring.”

— Amber Roberson, vice president of sales at Carbon

15. Find a New Job

“If your short-term career goal is to do a major jump in your role, more times than not it’s actually easier to leave a company and go somewhere else to do that. If you think about it, if you’re doing very well where you are working, sometimes you’re kind of typecast and thought of for a certain level. I was a director at one company and wanted to be a vice president of engineering. Sometimes it’s easier to sell yourself somewhere else. A recruiter contacted me on behalf of the CEO at Interleaf and I became a VP of development.”

— Steph Bacon, senior director of portfolio strategy at Red Hat

Why Are Short-Term Career Goals Important?

Short-term goals typically act as stepping stones toward long-term goals. They help you track progress, maintain momentum and guide you toward what needs to be done in order to reach larger milestones.

“The more you achieve your short-term goals, the closer you are to your long-term goals,” said Carpio. “The more you declare your long-term goals, the easier it is for you to determine your short-term goals.”

Short-term goals also help guard against getting passed over for the opportunities you want in your career, said B.J. Engelhardt, senior director of career services at Illinois Institute of Technology. Additionally, short-term career goals help determine which skill sets to build upon and get you to where you want to be, he noted.

How to Set Short-Term Career Goals

There’s no one right way to set a short-term career goal.

“I think people can often run into decision paralysis in trying to define,  prioritize [and set] the right goals,” Vu said. “What’s more important is to actually begin putting your intentions into action — any short-term goal that moves you in the general direction of where you want to be is a viable step in your roadmap.”

Taking action not only builds personal momentum — it also unlocks new opportunities and routes that will ultimately lead to your intended destination, or perhaps even toward an option you hadn’t previously seen for yourself, she added.

Here are some actions you can take when setting short-term career goals:

Find Accountability

Accountability is key, according to Gail Matthews, a psychologist and adjunct professor at the Dominican University of California.

In Matthews’ research, based on a survey of 149 participants who set various goals, it was the participants who shared their action plans with friends and updated them with weekly progress reports who accomplished the most.

“The positive effect of accountability was supported,” Matthews wrote. “Those who sent weekly progress reports to their friend accomplished significantly more than those who had unwritten goals, wrote their goals, formulated action commitments or sent those action commitments to a friend.”

Use the SMART Goals Template

Consider using a SMART goal format to set up your short-term goals. SMART goals are ones that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Based

Visualize Your Short-Term Career Goal Set-Up

Organizing and prioritizing a number of short-term goals all at once may seem challenging, but Vu uses a workflow visualization kanban tool to map out her weekly, monthly and yearly goals.

“It helps to visualize everything,” Vu said. “Prioritizing from easiest to hardest often helps with deciding what to tackle first, unless there are deadlines, then you can plan your tasks according to schedule.”

Set Career Goals Through Journaling 

Frequently recording your thoughts in a journal is one way to set career goals, said Roberson. 

Every year, Roberson takes a moment to reflect on the past year’s events. She reads through her journal to understand what happened and uses that information to make sure she’s still on track with her short-term goals, which in turn will help her to the next level.

Overall, as you set short-term goals, remember that life is unpredictable, said Sikowitz.

“We often get asked by our students and alumni, ‘I want to be X in 25 years, what are the exact steps that I should take to get there?’ It’s impossible to reverse engineer your career,” Sikowitz said. “You can’t know where life will take you.”

While looking far ahead can be daunting, short-term goals provide structure to take the first steps, and the ability to achieve something in the here and now to get there.

Frequently Asked Questions