Setting career goals! 🚀

Summary

Highlights

• CharliMarieTV stresses the importance of career goals and their role in decision-making. 🚀
• She reflects on her initial goal of working at a prestigious advertising agency, which later changed. 🔄
• Career goals should evolve, allowing you to adapt and find success in unexpected paths. 🌈
• Charli has achieved her goal of flexible work-life balance without full-time freelancing. 💼
• Public speaking at design conferences is a current goal for sharing her design journey. 🎙️
• She aspires to write a book to inspire those entering the design field. 📖
• Leadership in design remains a long-term goal, with skills being developed over time. 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Career goals are essential but should be flexible to adapt with your evolving aspirations. 🎯
• Goals help in making informed decisions when opportunities arise. 🤔
• Setting goals for states of being, like work-life balance, can be more fulfilling than specific titles or positions. 🌟
• Public speaking and writing contribute to personal and professional growth. 📚🎤
• Leadership development can be a long-term goal, achieved through continuous personal development. 🏆

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Career Goals The chapter titled 'Introduction to Career Goals' discusses the importance of setting career goals. It raises questions about whether the listener has career goals, the specifics of these goals, and if they include timelines such as a one-year or five-year plan. The chapter emphasizes that defining career goals is crucial for knowing the direction of your career and for making informed decisions when opportunities arise.
• 00:30 - 01:00: The Importance of Career Goals The chapter emphasizes the importance of having career goals, explaining that goals can guide decision-making by helping individuals determine which opportunities to pursue. However, it also acknowledges that career goals can and should change over time as one's interests and experiences evolve. The author shares a personal anecdote about their own shifting career aspirations, detailing how they once dreamed of working in an advertising agency like Saatchi and Saatchi, but later found fulfillment in working in-house within the tech industry.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Evolving Career Aspirations The chapter "Evolving Career Aspirations" discusses the speaker's reflection on their initial career goals. While they aimed for a career at a prestigious agency when they started in design, they have since changed their aspirations. Even though they didn't achieve that original goal, they don't consider themselves a failure. The initial goal was beneficial, providing guidance and motivation to improve, as it set a high benchmark to aspire towards. It underscores the importance of setting ambitious goals to facilitate growth and progression in one's career.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Current Career Goals The chapter discusses the importance of having career goals that drive and push you to improve your skills. The speaker is a professional designer with seven years of experience and is contemplating future career goals for the next 7 to 10 years. Unlike when they first started, their goals no longer involve working for specific clients or companies.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Achieving Work-Life Balance The chapter explores the concept of work-life balance, emphasizing how work and life goals often overlap. The speaker reflects on personal achievements, noting that recent successes have allowed them to work flexibly, anytime and from anywhere, which was a major life goal. Initially believing full-time freelancing was necessary to achieve this freedom, they built a reputation through various projects over the years.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Public Speaking Ambitions In the chapter titled 'Public Speaking Ambitions', the speaker shares their career journey and philosophy on goal setting. They explain how they achieved career freedom and flexibility by working at a remote company without going full-time freelance. They emphasize the importance of setting goals based on desired states or outcomes rather than specific methods or elements. This approach allowed them to fulfill the purpose behind their initial goals, even if the exact path was different from what they initially envisioned. The speaker also mentions having elaborated more on this approach to goal-setting in one of their videos.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Writing a Book This chapter discusses the author's career goals, specifically focusing on public speaking. The author has been engaged in public speaking related to YouTube but aspires to be invited to speak at design conferences. They emphasize setting personal career goals, using their own aspirations as an example.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Leadership Goals The chapter "Leadership Goals" delves into the speaker's aspirations surrounding their professional journey, particularly focusing on public speaking and project work. The speaker emphasizes the importance of public speaking practice in achieving their goals and outlines their motivation for participating in design conferences. They find inspiration in learning from others' processes and are driven to contribute to these creative, professional spaces by sharing their insights and experiences with a wider audience. This chapter highlights the speaker's evolving perspectives on leadership and their desire to inspire and be inspired by the design community.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Long-term Career Vision The chapter discusses long-term career goals, emphasizing involvement in and contribution to the design community. A notable aspiration mentioned is the desire to write and design a personal book, inspired by past experiences designing a book for a company. This ambition includes the satisfaction of creating a physical object that reflects personal effort and creativity.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Conclusion The conclusion chapter reflects the author's aspiration for the book to be a comprehensive guide for aspiring designers. It aims to serve as an inspirational and practical tool, encouraging individuals to pursue a career in design. The book intends to set readers on the right path, providing them with the necessary guidance and motivation to succeed. The author expresses a personal goal of incorporating these elements into both the book and their videos, with the hope of creating an influential resource for the design community. Although still a work in progress, this goal remains a significant aspiration in the author's career.

Setting career goals! 🚀 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I'm curious do you set career goals do you have some things in mind that you know you want to get out of your career at some point do they have dates attached to them maybe you got like a one-year five-year plan I don't know career goals is what I want to talk about today I think it is super important to set goals for your career I think that you need to know where you're heading and that having goals can help you make decisions when opportunities
• 00:30 - 01:00 come up you'll know whether to take them or not based on whether they fit your goals or not the thing with goals though is that they should be allowed to change when I was first getting started in the design industry I had very different hopes and dreams for my career I wanted to work at an agency like an advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi was like my dream I just thought that that would be like peak pinnacle design career if I could get a job there now though I could not imagine working somewhere like that I love working in house I love working in tech and that's just not what I was
• 01:00 - 01:30 aiming for when I started out my career so if I stuck to the goal that I set at the very beginning you could say I failed it but I sure as heck don't feel like a failure so even though that fancy agency Korea isn't what I'm aiming for anymore I do like that I set it as a goal when I was just getting started with design it helped me make decisions and it pushed me to be better because I knew that they would have a super high standard for hiring and it was good to have something to work towards I always want to be moving in a forward direction
• 01:30 - 02:00 and I always want to be aiming for something even if that thing I made before changes I think it's really healthy to have something that's driving you and pushing you to better yourself and better your skills right now I'm about seven years into a career as a professional designer and I've been thinking a lot lately about what my goals are for perhaps the next 7 to 10 years now as opposed to when I was starting out my goals don't revolve around working at a certain place like having a certain client instead they're
• 02:00 - 02:30 about the kind of life that I want to leave because work and life are very intertwined for me and so my work and career goals are kind of like my life goals as well I think the reason I've been do young girls a lot lately is because I've realized that I've actually achieved one of the goals that I set a few years ago to be able to work when and where I want and to have that freedom I always thought that I would have to achieve that goal by becoming a full-time freelancer and that's why I was like taking on projects here and there and building up reputation as it
• 02:30 - 03:00 turned out now I have a job at a remote company and I have all of that freedom and flexibility without having to go full-time freelance so that is why I think you should set goals based on a certain States you want to be in rather than prescribing the exact elements that were going to achieving that for example if a few years ago I said in three years time I want to be a full-time freelancer I would have failed that goal however what I have achieved is the purpose and the reasoning behind why that was my goal if that makes sense I talked more about my approach to go sitting in this way in a video that I
• 03:00 - 03:30 filmed at the very very end of 2017 so I'll link them on a card for you to go watch if you want to hear more about that but right now I just want to share a couple of my career goals with you and encourage you to set your own one of the main goals I have for my career right now and something that I want you know to be a part of my career is speaking at events about my work I've been doing auto public speaking recently over the past few years it's mostly being about YouTube though I would really like to get to a state to where I am invited to speak at design conferences about work that I've done my design process and
• 03:30 - 04:00 projects things like that that is what I'm aiming for and I think all of the public speaking that I'm doing at the moment is all great practice for that and I'm still working on all the projects and coming up with like what my hook is like what my design focus talk would be the reason this is my goal is because I find so much inspiration and hearing from others process and going to design conferences hearing people talk about their work and it's just opened my eyes over the years to many different ways of doing things many different types of work and so I want to be contributing to that I want to share my
• 04:00 - 04:30 story and I want to be involved and like give back to the design community in that way another goal that I have that I really only started talking to people about quite recently is that eventually I want to write a book as you know if you saw my video about it I designed a book recently it's called I have blogger and it was a book for save other company that I work for we were branded by the way he used to be cooking Birkett designing that book gave me a taste of what it's like to have a physical object with you on it and so now I really want to write one as well so that I have a book that I've both designed ambition I don't know
• 04:30 - 05:00 how much I should talk about it now but I really want the book to be like something that you give to people when they're wanting to get into a career in design or like it's the guidebook that you pick up when you think that this might be what you want to do to set you off on the right path and yeah encourage you inspire you and give you the tools that you need to be a successful designer that's also kind of the aim of my videos but yeah it's still a work in progress taking over in my mind but that is a goal that I have for my career is to average in a book then the last goal
• 05:00 - 05:30 that I'll share right now is one that I took off my goals list for a while but I've put it back on because I've realized that there's you know many different ways that I could achieve it and that is to be a leader to be a design lead or to have like a small team under me that I am leading the reason I took this goal off my list for a while is because I realized that I don't really like working at big companies I don't want to be a senior designer with you know some junior designers under me at a company that's a thousand people and generally companies need to be bigger in order to require like you know
• 05:30 - 06:00 multiple levels of design leadership so I thought that perhaps that's not something that I could aim for anymore they either I realized that I was thinking a little bit too small with that and I was thinking a little bit too near-term I think that leadership and leading a team is going to be a goal that I achieve many many years from now probably in like you know the latter half of my career and that's okay it still feels a bit weird to me to have a goal on my list that isn't something I'm actively you know trying to achieve like right now because I feel like one of the other goals that I have for life
• 06:00 - 06:30 business work whatever ah are things that I'm actively working on and like would would love to happen tomorrow for example this one is a goal that I am NOT interested in right now but I know it's something that I want out of my career as a whole eventually so for example if a role came up to lead a small design team at a company with a couple hundred people or whatever I probably wouldn't be interested in it right now right now I'm really happy with where I am I'm really happy to not have a team under me to think about I just have to think about my own work and helping out you know my peers on my team so this goal is
• 06:30 - 07:00 just like sitting dormant I know it's to be something that I eventually stopped working on and I like to think that at the moment I'm building up like the people skills the communication skills that will eventually come in handy for leadership one day so that is some of my career goals as a whole my goal for my career is just to do work that I love for companies that I believe in and have meaning in my work and a good work-life balance but yeah all of those little specifics that I talked about are things that go into making up
• 07:00 - 07:30 that bigger goal so just like asked at the start of this video do you have goals for your career I would love to hear about them down below in the comments if you felt like sharing them yeah what are you aiming for what are you working towards what have you already achieved so far that you set as a goal earlier on in your career share them down below let's have a chat if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to hear more just musings on design careers and you know design and general from me then please give this video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe as well because new videos about design come out every single week alright thanks for
• 07:30 - 08:00 watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]