How to Set Realistic Career Expectations and Stay Motivated
Picture this: navigating the winding path of career progression can be a daunting endeavor. Insights from a Founder and a Chief Marketing Officer offer invaluable guidance to steer the course. Discover how experts recommend setting incremental career goals as a starting point and conclude with the significance of sharing both external and internal data to keep motivation high. This article compiles four essential insights to help set realistic expectations and maintain motivation throughout four's career journey.
- Set Incremental Career Goals
- Focus on Achievable Milestones
- Show Clear Progression Paths
- Share External and Internal Data
Set Incremental Career Goals
When interacting with clients, I stress the need for setting definite measures that are incremental relative to what they want to achieve in their professional careers and the time it will take to achieve those measures. I assist them in breaking their career goals into smaller steps so that each step, even though it is progressive, feels realistic to the client and serves to motivate them further.
PMP training and certification training focusing on pre-determined achievable targets for each phase of a project in my practice assist. I employ this approach in my MBA career in order to evaluate how much they have achieved and how effective their strategies have been. They focus on the smaller parts, challenging themselves while always keeping the larger objectives in focus. It's a simple yet effective way to set expectations.
Focus on Achievable Milestones
One approach I use to help clients set realistic expectations for their career journeys is by focusing on incremental progress, rather than big, immediate results. I work with them to break down their long-term goals into smaller, achievable milestones that can be tracked and celebrated along the way. This keeps the momentum going, and allows them to see tangible progress without getting overwhelmed or discouraged by the larger picture.
I also emphasize the importance of resilience and adaptability. Setbacks are part of the process, and it's crucial to adjust your approach without losing sight of the end goal. By fostering a mindset that values learning and persistence, I help clients stay motivated and focused, even when challenges arise.
Show Clear Progression Paths
Through our Captain Development Program, we've discovered that the most effective way to manage career expectations is by showing clear, achievable progression paths backed by real examples. When new team members join Premier Staff, we share specific success stories, like event staff who've progressed to managing high-profile activations for clients like Ferrari and Louis Vuitton. Rather than making vague promises, we outline concrete steps and timeframes for advancement tied to specific skill development and performance metrics. This transparent approach has helped us maintain a 99.6% staff retention rate and develop numerous team members from entry-level positions to managing major luxury events with hundreds of staff.
Share External and Internal Data
The best thing we can do is share external data. There's a lot of distance between what people think job availability looks like, what average compensations look like, and what career-progression times look like and the reality of those factors. If you Google it, there is no shortage of surveys highlighting the massive gap between expectations and reality. We find that providing data to our clients just to say, "Here's what the market actually looks like, not what your friends think it looks like," is really valuable.
The second thing we can do is share internal data. Internal data helps establish what a sense of normalcy is. We know from research by large multinational recruiting firms, like Ron Stock, a multimillion-dollar company, that the average job search today takes five months. However, from our work with career-coaching clients, our average job search with our clients is three and a half months. Being able to manage expectations by saying, "We've worked with a lot of people; we understand what this is going to look like; and we can reasonably assume if you're the average person, this is how much time you should expect to put into the process until you get your outcome," helps make expectations for career journeys more helpful. Internal data also applies to things like geography—where there's hot hiring and where there isn't—as well as compensation expectations by industry, seniority, field of study, and credentials. These insights can be really valuable. We take a data-driven approach to managing expectations.
Lastly, you realize that setting expectations isn't just a matter of having the right facts. So after you've conveyed the data, and after you've made this passionately available in what the outside world is telling us and what our own work with clients is telling us, you still might have a feeling of resistance emerging on the part of your client. That resistance is often an emotional problem. For instance, someone might hate their job so much that it's heartbreaking for them to hear that they'll have to wait three and a half months for a new opportunity. This is where being present, supportive, emotionally attentive, and available to the client is key. Recognizing that part of expectation setting is just validating their feelings and helping them reconcile those emotions is crucial for making peace and progress with the reality of what is likely to happen.
