All professionals should have an idea of where they’re going in their careers, what they’re trying to achieve. This applies whether you’re fresh out of undergrad and entering the workforce or a c-suite executive with decades of experience.
Having goals for professional growth helps you avoid feelings of stagnation, complacency, and overall dissatisfaction with your career. Personal development goals that maintain your motivation will make your role more enjoyable and fulfilling on a daily basis.
Creating a professional development plan, with clearly mapped out goals and steps to achieve them, is key to giving your career direction in both the short and long-term. It’s a process that requires a healthy amount of self reflection, and one that you should dedicate sufficient time to in order to get right.
To find out just what steps you need to take to create your ideal professional development plan, we sourced tips and advice from careers experts at five top business schools across the US and Europe. Using their insights and knowledge we have also created a free downloadable Professional Development Plan template you can use to kickstart your own journey.
Reflect first to identify your professional development goals
By its very nature, a professional development plan looks ahead to the goals and milestones you wish to achieve in future. However, it’s crucial that in curating your own plan you look inward within yourself.
Your values, interests, and motivations are a fundamental part of who you are on both a personal and professional level. Reflecting on them will help guide you toward a career plan that aligns with what’s important to you.
“To truly grow as a professional, it helps to look deeper than external achievements and reflect on the kind of person and leader you want to be,” says Celia Paris, PhD, executive director of Leadership Development for MBA Programs at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
“Once you do some self-reflection in these areas, it becomes possible to identify a much richer set of possibilities for your development.”
Skip this step and you risk drawing up a professional development plan that fails to match with your motivations; you could end up pursuing a role that ultimately isn’t what you expected or as fulfilling as you had hoped it would be.
“Avoid creating a plan that reads like a wish list or is based too heavily on external validation—like aiming for a job title without knowing what it entails, or pursuing a goal just because it’s what others around you are doing,” explains Paula Amorim, MBA admissions director at IESE Business School.
“Many people forget to consider how their personal lives and values intersect with their professional goals. A truly effective plan takes the whole person into account.”
As well as exploring what makes you tick, reflecting on your career journey so far is a similarly important step to take before you begin looking ahead to what the future may bring.
Exploring your recent achievements at work, the skills you have shown, and the strengths you have developed can help you further refine your short and long-term priorities. This could result in you seeking out roles that will help you develop in an area where you are weaker, for example, or pursuing a specialist path that hones your strengths.
“Consider what you have learnt, what you have delivered and how you have made an impact in the previous 12 months. These tough questions can help to expose what is important when defining your new priorities and what you want the shift to be,” says Chloe Chambers, Weekend MBA Careers lead and coach at Imperial Business School.
How to set your professional development goals
Setting your goals for professional development is the fundamental part of your plan. Effectively identifying the goals you want to achieve—whether they be particular roles, awards, or other types of milestones—will provide a framework that dictates your future actions.
“Imagining desired roles and articulating goals can be helpful in generating motivation and identifying areas for further research,” says Celia from Chicago Booth.
Your plan can comprise long-term and short-term goals, and ideally it should be a mixture of both.
The goals you identify should be SMART, meaning they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, an experienced professional working in tech could set themselves the specific and measurable goal of reaching the level of senior project manager at a big tech firm within the next five years. Alternatively, a recent graduate who has just landed a role in management consulting could establish a key goal to speak in a client presentation within their first six months.
Mapping out SMART goals will ensure that your plan is realistic and that you are clear on how to achieve particular milestones, reducing the likelihood of being disappointed later on. Unrealistic goals and timelines are particularly unhelpful for career development, says Pamela Harvey, director of Career Education and Initiatives at Columbia Business School.
“But at the same time, it [your professional development plan] should not include or reflect limiting beliefs that could stop one from setting reach goals,” she adds.
It’s also important to avoid making life difficult for yourself by setting too many goals to achieve within a specific time frame, as this can lead to heightened pressure and feelings of stress that can negatively impact your work.
“One, maximum two, goals at once only,” advises Randall S. Peterson, professor of organizational behaviour and academic director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School. “More than that and you do not have the energy to keep it going along with your day job. Ideally focus on one goal at a time, with multiple learning strategies being used to deliver that.”
Strategies to achieve your professional development goals
Once your goals are established, you can work backward to identify the key steps you need to take in order to achieve them.
Often, plotting a path toward your goal will reveal gaps in your expertise that may require you to develop a new skill or gain experience in a particular area. Your development strategies should therefore focus on how you intend to do this.
“You need to include how you are going to learn specific skills (from mentors, role plays, workshops, etc.). You also need to know who will give you feedback and support through the process,” explains Randall.
Professional growth strategies can include concrete actions such as undertaking training on specific skills, gaining a certification that’s relevant in your particular industry, or enrolling in a degree to provide a platform to take the next step in your career.
It’s also a good idea to plan out some experimental steps that could contribute to achieving your goal, without necessarily offering any guarantee of success. Attending networking sessions or seeking out mentorship from someone within your industry are examples of this.
“The goal is not simply to act as a way of moving forward, but to experiment in order to learn more about the skills, tactics, and approaches that will help you have the impact you want,” says Celia from Chicago Booth.
And when it comes to filling your skill gaps, it’s not enough to simply focus on the technical skills that are relevant within your role or industry. Across most career paths, developing softer, interpersonal skills is also important to ensuring professional development.
“While technical skills are often easier to measure, soft skills like empathy, decision-making, and active listening are equally important. These may not always be quantifiable but emotional intelligence plays a critical role in workplace dynamics. Include plans for refining these skills,” advises Chloe from Imperial.
Finally, it’s important to treat your professional development plan as a living document that you can return to and refine whenever required. Your plan should be a useful resource that can help you, rather than something that places a limit on your progression—having a rigidity that doesn’t allow for adjustments as needed is a common mistake, says Michael De Lucia, executive director of International and MS Career Management at Columbia Business School.
By mapping out a professional development plan that aligns with your core values and motivations, features achievable long and short-term goals, and includes steps to fill your skills gaps and progress toward key milestones, you’ll have a framework that keeps you accountable as you move forward in your career path and gives you the platform to achieve your potential.
