Goal-setting for career strategy

- Goal setting is absolutely critical in career strategy. Even if you set overarching goals for yourself that aren't too meticulous, I think they can be great guides for the path that you want to take. For example, if you want to make a certain salary by a certain age or you want a certain title by a certain space in your career, you can back out some larger steps to get there. One thing that was really important for me growing up where I did, I'm from Montgomery, Alabama. I never really had a good grasp of what a competitive salary would be for somebody like me in my field. And so I would set these goals of, I want to make this amount by the time I'm 30, or I want to make this amount by, right when I graduate, fresh out of college. When I did that I was able to see if I was tracking well to that goal. Which is something that I would have never known or learned how to do with my background. And so I would say, "Okay, if I'm going to take an internship, "is this internship something that can help me "get to the job that I want after I graduate, "so I could make that salary mark that I want to make?" And then kind of, as I continue throughout my career I was making sure that I was properly tracking to where I could meet that goal that I wanted to reach by a certain age. A woman that I really admire, her name is, Shellye Archambeau, she is a total badass black woman in tech. I admire her for a lot of reasons but I think the biggest is, around how strategic she was about her career. So she decided that she wanted to be the CEO of IBM. She started her career at IBM and she said, "I'm going to work my way up till I'm the CEO". And so what she did was, she looked up all the past CEOs of the company and she looked at their career paths and figured out where they started. And the first thing she realized is that most of them started in sales. And so she said, "I'm going to start in sales". She started there. In two years she moved to the next role and kind of worked her way all the way to, I think it was a vice-president role. And ultimately, after a few years she realized, that the CEO job may or may not come to fruition and so she had to think about adjusting and possibly changing. And she embraced that change and decided to become the CEO of MetricStream. And even though she had this long kind of standing dream to become the CEO of IBM, when she changed to being the CEO of MetricStream, she found that it was the job of her life. She orchestrated one of the biggest tech turnarounds in Silicone Valley, it was recently featured on Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, to talk about that turnaround and how she did it. And it just speaks to you, you can plan and you should create this structured way to get to where you want to go. But also, you need to be flexible, right? And sometimes, the big thing, the big job, the big opportunity, is where you never would have expected it to be. So do what you can to plan, but also, kind of, be flexible and fluid in how you get there.