What are your Career Goals?

Protagion’s mentors and coaches cover a wide variety of career goals, offering their expertise and experience to support our proteges with their professional career development. Those familiar with our protege platform know there are over 30 career goals to select from, as well as the ability to set your own and track your progress.

Given this broad range, we’ve also distilled it down to 9 main categories, noting that we will each have different goals at different phases of our lives and careers. Which of the categories are most relevant to you right now?

More detail on these 9, including selected mentors and coaches who can support with each, as well as links to our articles on topics related to that objective, is available on our website. They are accessible by hovering above the “Proteges” heading in the banner on the top of each page until “Career Goals” appears, and then selecting those of interest. The link to each of the 9 groupings is shared below for ease too:

• Promotion i.e. aiming to get ahead in your career, recognising that there are different levels in one’s career (Manager of Others, Manager of Managers, Manager of Function, Manager of Business, and Manager of Group)
• New Skills, including technical ones, leadership, presentation etc
• Further Professional Qualifications i.e. studying further – examples include Masters, Fellowship, CFA, MBA etc
• Moving Countries for work, including experiencing a new culture with new norms & expectations
• Switching roles – for example into consulting from industry, or into contracting or gig working, or into a startup environment
• Career Transition i.e. changing specialism or profession
• Managing a Business including setting direction, executing your vision, building lasting relationships, driving change etc
• Establishing a Portfolio Career including sharing your executive expertise and building alternative income streams
• Searching for Purpose & Meaning

We trust you will find these categories and resources helpful as you develop in your own career – we’re happy to help when you need us, including personalised suggestions as well as coaching or mentoring from experienced professionals.

To get a feel for the relative importance of selected career goals to our followers on LinkedIn and Twitter, we recently ran a poll on each. From the choices of (i) new skills / studying further, (ii) promotion, and (iii) transition of role, specialism or country, we were surprised to find differences between the two social media platforms / audiences, although note that the sample sizes were small:

• On LinkedIn, promotion was the most popular professional career goal 
• On Twitter, most respondents chose new skills / studying further

Thank you to those of you who shared your perspective in either poll, and for following us on those platforms.

We conclude this post with some insights from the career survey we’re running publicly i.e. open to all professionals to participate. Please do share your thoughts with us if you haven’t already. In addition to your top career goals, the survey explores what drives you, career questions you’ve faced, how you address them, your sources of guidance/support and more…

From the responses so far (thank you!) a number of you are aiming for independence in your careers and/or want to start your own businesses. Thought leadership and studying further feature strongly too, together with personal mastery, discovering your sense of purpose and attaining work life balance. Some wish to manage or build a team, while others are keen to deliver in their existing roles. Building your personal brands, seeking a new challenge, transitioning to a new industry or specialism, diversifying your income, and pursuing creative activities are also popular.