35 professional goals to inspire you in 2023 (for every department in your organization)

Need (or want) to set some professional goals? Maybe you…

• Feel stuck in your career path, and want to challenge yourself to grow;
• Need clear, achievable targets to measure your progress;
• Are trying to get more clarity on your next career steps;
• Simply want inspiration to increase your productivity at work.

Sounds familiar?

If so, then you’ve come to the right place.

Today, we’ll give you a list of inspiring career goals to ramp up your success. Even better, we’ll categorize this list based on the different departments of your organization, so you can focus on the goals that are relevant to you.

Excited? Let’s get rolling.

Get started with monday.com

Marketing goals

Marketing is a data-driven profession.

Sadly, many marketers get sidetracked by numbers and graphs and forget that without direction, those things are meaningless.

Sure, you already set goals, it’s your job.

But aiming for lower CPCs or a higher ROAS won’t get you very far in your career advancement.

And it’s not just us saying that.

Surveys reveal that marketing professionals who actually set goals are 376% more likely to succeed.

So what do these types of goals look like in the real world?

Some examples include:

• Goal 1: Drive 1,000,000 visitors to our blog by EOY (and convert 5% of them into subscribers).
• Goal 2: Read a marketing book each week (that’s 52 books per year, which can boost your knowledge about your field).
• Goal 3: Build the most engaged marketing team ever (and the most accountable, too).
• Goal 4: Win the Clio Awards next year.
• Goal 5: Implement a new marketing idea each month (and evaluate performance).

Customer service goals

Sometimes customer service can be a true nightmare.

Think about it:

Day after day, you’re dealing with frustrated customers who channel all their anger to you.

The worst part?

Instead of punching them in the face, you’ve to swallow your pride and answer with a smile.

The point is that without solid goals that motivate you, you’ll eventually either lose your temper or look for an alternative career path.

To help you out, here are some goals you could use as inspiration:

• Goal 1: Become the best customer service rep in my organization.
• Goal 2: Connect (more deeply) with colleagues and customers and build genuine relationships.
• Goal 3: Reduce customer complaint rate by 70%.
• Goal 4: Reduce customer wait time by 50%.
• Goal 5: Prove I can be trusted with greater responsibility (by doing my best each day).

Product development goals

A few decades ago, a mediocre product supported by a solid marketing campaign was enough to build a business.

Nowadays, things are much harder — companies launch new products every other day, and users are growing tired of it.

To succeed, organizations must adopt a “less but better” approach and develop products that solve tangible, profound problems.

In other words, differentiation by marketing is no longer enough.

To adopt this philosophy, you must set goals that inspire you to build better products.

For example:

• Goal 1: Build a user experience that helps customers thrive.
• Goal 2: Merge work and play in the office to increase creativity and reduce stress.
• Goal 3: Deliver a constant flow of good results to stakeholders.
• Goal 4: Reduce churn rate by 50% this year.
• Goal 5: Take a course on gamification to increase customer engagement.

Sales goals

It’s not a secret that goal setting is a vital activity for any sales professional. Your job literally depends on setting and achieving sales goals.

But what about setting a personal goal? A goal that moves you toward developing a new skill or improving an existing one?

Are you setting those types of goals?

If not, it might be time to start.

For example:

• Goal 1: Break the record of sales in my company by the end of this quarter.
• Goal 2: Find a mentor that helps me top up my selling game.
• Goal 3: Interview 10 of the best salespeople in the industry and build solid relationships with them.
• Goal 4: Record and study every single one of my sales calls to improve my skills.
• Goal 5: Attend at least 1 sales conference each month.

Management goals

What’s the difference between “good enough” organizations and great ones?

It’s not just that great companies set goals, but they set the right ones.

If you’re in a leadership role, one of your main duties is to find the right goals for your team (and help your team set career goals for themselves, too).

So what kind of goals should you set?

In our opinion, your goals should aim to build a place for meaningful work and meaningful relationships.

As Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t,” put it:

“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”

For example:

• Goal 1: Dedicate at least a day per week to listen to my team’s opinions and needs.
• Goal 2: Improve productivity by 20% this year.
• Goal 3: Be nominated at TopWorkplaces.com within 2 years.
• Goal 4: Build a genuine relationship with at least 10 employees this year.
• Goal 5: Take care of my physical well-being in the workplace and beyond.

HR goals

People are the greatest asset of any organization.

If you bring in people who don’t share your culture and don’t care about your mission, you’ll struggle to achieve commitment.

If you want to become a “big player” in HR, you must become an expert in spotting the right people and helping them uncover their true potential.

The first step is to set effective goals that get you closer to it.

For instance:

• Goal 1: Take a course on psychology at the workplace to improve my HR skills.
• Goal 2: Develop an employee onboarding program that disrupts the industry.
• Goal 3: Build an effective remote team to face COVID-19.
• Goal 4: Nurture a culture of well-being and happiness in the workplace.
• Goal 5: Expand the use of technology to enhance talent management efforts.

Get started

Accounting and finance goals

Accounting and finance professionals are vital for any team.

Without you, every single business in the world would fall apart in less than a New York second.

But the world is changing (and fast).

Every year, new legislation, regulations, and laws threaten organizations’ integrity.

To stay relevant, you must adopt an “always-be-learning” philosophy and develop any essential skill to support businesses in a constant-changing environment.

Here’s where goals come in handy.

For example:

• Goal 1: Educate myself on where the industry is headed (and make sure my professional knowledge is always up to date).
• Goal 2: Organize a weekly meeting to discuss the financial details of the company and how each person will contribute to profitability.
• Goal 3: Learn to use accounting software to increase efficiency.
• Goal 4: Implement a creative capital allocation strategy that keeps our company financially solid.
• Goal 5: Get ISO-certified within 5 months.

How to set, track, and achieve your goals with monday.com

Now that you’ve set some goals, what’s next?

Measuring progress, of course.

No matter how many goals you set, if you don’t track your activities and monitor performance, you’ll never know whether you’re moving in the right direction.

The question is: how do you actually track goals efficiently?

Here’s where monday.com comes in…

What’s monday.com?

monday.com is a work operating system (Work OS).

That is, a cloud-based platform where you can build a custom digital workspace to manage projects, organize your team, and track the progress of your goals.

Some of our core features include:

• Automations: streamline up to 250,000 human actions and save time on repetitive work.
• Integrations: seamlessly integrate the tools and apps your team is already using.
• Customizations: get access to LEGO-like building blocks to design a platform that meets your needs.
• Dashboards: monitor your performance with powerful data visualizations and reporting dashboards.

With monday.com, you can’t only organize your goals in a single place, but also keep a close eye on progress and collaborate with your team to make them a reality.

Customizable templates

To make the process even easier, we provide you with 200+ pre-built templates you can install in one click. Just select a template of your choice, insert your information, and start working.

It’s really that simple.

In the context of professional goal setting, we suggest you start with the following template.

OKR template

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results.

Studies reveal that breaking down an objective into actionable steps increases your chances of success by 40%. The OKR framework taps into this fact and helps you not only set professional goals, but also develop an action plan to achieve them.

With our OKR template, you can implement this methodology with ease.

This template allows you to set quarterly goals and define clear tasks for each of them. Besides, you can invite team members and collaborate in a single place, which will make the whole goal-setting process way easier.

Time to set some goals!

Setting goals is crucial for growth.

Goals help you measure whether you’re moving in the right direction or need some pivoting. Besides, the right goals can keep you and your team motivated and productive throughout your entire career.

But setting goals is just the first step.

To get results, you must transition from goal setting to implementation and develop a system to tracking progress.

Instead of doing it with pen and paper, like most people do, a Work OS like monday.com will help you do it more efficiently.

If you’re ready to see for yourself, why don’t you try our fully customizable OKR template and start setting some goals?