A Roadmap for Professional Goals

Congratulations! You’ve made it through Q4 planning, budget meetings, yearly hindsight reviews, the holidays with your family and you’re feeling refreshed and inspired for 2020.

Or, maybe you’re wiped out.

Sitting at your desk, thinking about what lies in the year ahead can be a little overwhelming. Especially when you start mapping out all the details.

As marketers, we’re all about the strategies. We make plans for execution, creativity and measurement to show organizational impact and growth. When it comes to our clients, this exercise comes naturally. When it comes to us, not so much. So, what would happen if we applied the same thoughtfulness to our professional goals?

I love creating plans for our teams to be successful. From digital campaign development to technical development solutions. From online to offline to in-person connections, we need to consider every angle, being agile in our approach.

A core piece of any marketing strategy is a content calendar. These handy documents are roadmaps created to keep the team focused on goals from month to month, ensuring we stay the course throughout the year.

Starting the new year got my wheels turning: what if we used this content calendar to guide our professional growth as well? 

We have the structure for success. We know how effective it can be. Why not create one for the work week?

The great part of any content calendar: it’s completely customized. It can have a 50,000-foot view to outline goals or capture something as granular as “yoga at 6PM on Wednesdays.”

In this three-part blog series I will outline the nuts and bolts to help get you started on building a content calendar. For this post, we will focus on step one:

Identify your themes, goals and responsibilities

• Personalize. 
  This is your content calendar. It needs to reflect what is important to you and your professional goals.
• Keep Learning. 
  Interested in a new skill or department? Add it to your list to learn more and look for ways to get involved.
• Community. 
  Find your people! You don’t have to look hard to find a networking or industry group to join. But, you do have to be thoughtful about where you spend your time. Peer development is important for professional growth and expanding your network. Engaging in these groups provides perspective and real people to bounce ideas off of. You get out what you put in.
• Collaborate. 
  Bosses and mentors and peers (oh my!). Want a promotion or a new area of expertise? Share your goals and those people will help pave a yellow brick road to get you there.
• Balance. 
  Work isn’t your only priority. Whether you’re a parent or a rock star or both, we all have things to get done outside of the office. Putting some structure around those priorities helps maintain the work-life balance that is essential to being a positive, productive professional. 

We’re used to advising teams and clients to best practices and marketing success. Across platforms and programs, people and priorities. If we take these tried and true strategies for personal and professional growth, they will provide perspective on opportunities for growth and a working guide to get you there.