Name: What are your future goals as a software developer and in life?
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Author: duomly

This article was originally published at https://www.blog.duomly.com/what-are-your-future-goals/

What are your future goals?

What are your future goals? This question is pretty common while interviewing for the job of your dreams. And that’s kind of understandable that company that would like to hire you, what’s to know what are your future goals for work or even in life.

First of all, if you can present your development plan and describe what you’d like to achieve in the next few years, you can be a great investment for the company to bring you onboard. On the other hand, they can help you develop yourself by giving you tasks that focus on your goals and future interests.

Besides the career aspect of your future goals, it’s also important for you. Imagine that you’ve just landed your first software developer job when you don’t set other goals for yourself. It will make you stop developing your skills and keep on a level that you manage to achieve. As a result, you can expect that your skills will get old and useless, and you can get out of the job market really fast. Also, there will be other people deserving of promotion who cares more about developing yourself and achieving more.

As you’ve already probably realized, in this article, I’d like to cover more career topics and go deeper into future goals and plan them.

As always, I’ve got a video version attached for those who prefer to watch instead of reading.

Let’s start!

What are future goals?

In the beginning, I’d like actually to focus on what are future goals. Even if it sounds really trivial, it’s not easy to decide what can be a goal or how you can define yours.

Future goals are defined achievements you’d like to realize in the future; it can be about the career, business, life, or even your family. Differently said, feature goals should be a clear vision of what you’d like to achieve. They should be measurable so you’d be able to track the result and finally decide how far you are from success.

To be able to achieve any of your goals, you need first to know what they are, and really many people go through their lives without defining what they actually what to achieve, and in the end, they find out that they didn’t achieve anything, they don’t have any purpose or direction to go.

It’s similar to walking; until you don’t have a clear goal of going, you probably won’t land on any place, just walking around, wasting time. When you know the goal, you can focus all available respires actually to achieve it, doesn’t it sound better?

How to plan future goals?

Planning your future goals should be a careful and wise process. First of all, you probably need to get rid of all the blockers you have in your head. I know many software developers often don’t set the goals and just let their careers go to see what’s happening. Not only software developers but other people as well. It happens because we are afraid to select just one path and quit on the other one because of the loose and uncertain feeling.

We prefer to follow someone else’s ideas, doing what our managers or family what’s from us. It’s way easier just to take what’s given to us and what until other opportunities will come. I bet many developers take the first offer they got, even if the job is not staffing, and then they wait until they get fired, believing that when a proper offer comes, they will change.

When you’ve done the first and the most important point, you can really start defining proper goals, having your own way to follow, and one day being really proud of your achievements and where you and your career are.

The easiest way to define goals is to find one big thing; it doesn’t have to be very clear and may seem very far away, but no worries. All you need is to make the main goal clear enough that you can see the finish line.

The big goal is anything, like becoming a manager, CTO or CEO, opening your own software agency or earning money as a freelancer, or maybe building your own startup.

When you have your big goal defined in your mind, you have to think of the steps you need to achieve. By defining the smaller goals, you are setting the exact steps to achieve your big goal. Those have to be more specific, achievable, realistic, and measurable. Also, they should be put in any timeframe, so you will be motivated to achieve them.

Besides the exact steps, smaller goals will give you small successes that will motivate you even more.

It’s also important to track the progress of your goals from time to time, so you know in what direction your progress is going. It may be required to update some of your goals in time, mistakes may happen, changes on the market may happen, but that’s fine, and some things may change during your self-development process.

So, when it’s clear how to define your future goals, let’s see what possible future goals for work are.

Future goals for work

Most people who are into self-development set lots of future goals for work. Depending on the job, people may have a lot of different goals in the career, but no matter the sector, it’s really great to get new skills connected to what you are actually doing or update your knowledge. For example, suppose you are a software developer. In that case, you could think of learning new technology or learning project management, which also can be a great goal or a small step to achieving bigger things like getting a promotion. The longer-term goal about the skills can be making a certification or degree or becoming an expert in some field.

Another long-term goal can be a career switch, and as a part of it, we can take a smaller goal that could be getting experience, for example, for a junior software engineer. Becoming an intern or taking a low paid job at the start can help you to achieve this one.

Another long-term goal that you can think of in the case of a career can be getting a leadership position. To achieve this one, you’d need some leadership skills, so learning this could be done as a smaller goal, or practicing the soft skills that are useful in leadership could work as well.

Any sector has some prestigious awards or contests, which can also be another goal to consider. To achieve something like an award, you need to focus on doing your best and improving the elements taken into account in those contests. Even if you don’t win first place, you’ll be awarded new skills and knowledge.

Future goals in life

On the other side, an essential part of everybody's self-development is also our everyday life, and everybody can find a lot to improve or learn. Many people would like to learn new skills, take care of their health, make a better relationship with their family members, or simply have more free time.
Working on future goals in life shouldn’t be much different from working on your career; similar, you need to start with a big thing you’d to achieve and then find a step-by-step way to that goal.

Let’s take a simple example; if you’d like to run a half-marathon, you need to start training to run in a selected event. Let’s imagine you have one year, so today you have to plan your training path. You should take into consideration that you probably won't run all 20k at once if you weren’t running at all until today.

Taking a small goal in the middle will help you to achieve that. So let’s assume that first, you’d like to run 5km, then 10km, next 15km, and finally 20km. When you train to achieve that one by one, you’ll have small successes on the way to your big thing!

Setting goals in your private life can be as good as in your career, and it’s important for you to become a better version of yourself and constantly work on other successes in your life.

Examples of future goals

Right now, I’d like to give you a few more examples of what can be taken as a career or personal goal.

Career goals examples

Start your own successful business
Get promoted to a higher position
Switch career
Learn a new skill that can be useful in your career
Become an expert in some field and start a consulting company
Get a job in a prestigious company

Life goals examples

Lose X kg and get in good shape
Learn new hobby type skill like cooking or photography
Get more time for yourself and your family
Improve your relationships and visit your parents more often
Organize a trip you’ve dreamt about
Learn to invest your money to get additional income

I hope the above list of example goals can lead you on a good path to decide your own.

How to set goals books

Some of you may not feel quite confident about setting your life goals yet. Some of you would like to go deeper into the process of setting and achieving the goals.

That's why, I decided to gather a few books for you, which could be very helpful in understanding why your future goals are so important and how to plan them.

Those books are also kind of motivation for those who still need some power to push forward.

5 known quotes on future goals

For the summary, I’d like to give you some motivation by giving you 5 quotes on future goals.

“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.”
—Andrew Carnegie

“By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands—your own.”
—Mark Victor Hansen

"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score."
–Bill Copeland

"If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time."
–Zig Ziglar

"If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
–Lawrence J. Peter

If you need motivation, print those and put them on your desk in a visible space, and remember that going somewhere is always better than walking without a direction.

Thank you for reading,
Anna from Duomly