- I'm curious: do you set career goals?
Do you have some things in mind
that you know you wanna get
out of your career at some point?
Do they have dates attached to them?
Have you got like a one-year, five-year plan?
I don't know.
Career goals is what I wanna talk about today.
(upbeat music)
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 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 & Saatchi was my dream.
I just thought that that would be peak,
pinnacle of 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 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 career
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 'cause 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
and I always want to be aiming for something,
even if that thing I'm aiming for 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 seven to 10 years.
Now, as opposed to when I was starting out,
my goals don't revolve around working at a certain place
or having a certain client.
Instead, they're about the kind of life
that I want to lead,
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 reflecting
on goals 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 taking on projects here and there
and building up a reputation.
As it turned out, now I have a job at a remote company
and I have all of that freedom and flexibility
without have to go full-time freelance.
So that is why I think you should set goals
based on a certain state you want to be in
rather than prescribing the exact elements
that will go into achieving that.
For example, if, a few years ago,
I said in three years' time
I wanna 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 goal-setting in this way
in a video that I filmed at the very, very end of 2017,
so I'll link that on a card for you to go watch
if you want hear more about that.
But right now I just wanna 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 to be a part of my career,
is speaking at events about my work.
I've been doing a lot of public speaking recently
over the past few years.
It's mostly been about YouTube, though.
I would really like to get to a state
where I am invited to speak at design conferences
about work that I've done, my design process
and 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 what my hook is,
what my design focus talk would be.
The reason this is my goal is because I find
so much inspiration in 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 wanna be contributing to that.
I wanna share my story and I wanna be involved
and 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 wanna write a book.
As you know, if you saw my video about it,
I designed a book recently, it's called I Am a Blogger,
and it was a book for Seva, the company that I work for.
We rebranded, by the way.
Used to be called ConvertKit.
Designing that book gave me a taste
of what it's like to have a physical object
with your name on it,
and so now I really wanna write one as well
so that I have a book that I've both designed and written.
I don't know how much I should talk about it now,
but I really want the book to be something
that you'd give to people
when they're wanting to get into a career in design,
or it's the guidebook that you pick up
when you think that this might be what you wanna 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 my mind,
but that is a goal that I have for my career,
is to have written a book.
Then the last goal 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 many different ways that I could achieve it,
and that is to be a leader, to be a design lead
or to have a small team under me that I'm 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 wanna be a senior designer
with some junior designers under me
at a company that's 1,000 people,
and generally, companies need to be bigger
in order to require multiple levels of design leadership.
So I thought that perhaps that's not something
that I could aim for anymore.
Lately, though, I realized that I was thinking
a little bit too small with it
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 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
trying to achieve right now,
because I feel like all of the other goals
that I have for life, business, work, whatever
are things that I'm actively working on
and 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.
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 my peers on my team.
So this goal is just like sitting dormant.
I know it's gonna be something
that I eventually start working on,
and I like to think that at the moment
I'm building up the people skills, the communication skills,
that will eventually come in handy for leadership one day.
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 that bigger goal.
So, just like I 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 'em down below, let's have a chat.
If you enjoyed this video and you'd like
to hear more musings on design careers
and design in 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 watching,
and I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.
(upbeat music)