Career Goals as of August 2007

Recently, I started the employee review process at work. Sure, there is the normal “rate you out of 5 stars” form, but I was intrigued that they have a process for employee development. “Do you have specific career goals in mind that we can write down to monitor your career development?” We are to write down our career goals and make action items to achieve them. The following year we are graded by how well we meet those career objective. Interesting…but how can I answer that question? I will answer it with a list of things that are broken down into categories.

Short-Term Career Goals (Now to 6 months)

• Educating myself on Rapid Application Development with CakePHP.
• Support open source projects, specifically CakePHP and jQuery.
• Develop a complete web application including: table relationships, user authentication, custom analytics, user groups, custom components, secure validation, custom user interface elements
• Speak at the jQuery Conference in Boston.

Persistent Career Goals (Daily)

• Write more readable and compact code.
• Become a better leader.
• Become a better follower.
• Educate those around me.
• Keep in contact with other open source developers.
• Continue to educate myself on a daily basis even on days I don’t feel like it.
• Press on when things are hard because I will probably learn an invaluable lesson from it.

Mid-Term Career Goals (6 months to 5 years)

• Speak at conferences worldwide about my area of expertise.
• Manage a team of developers.
• Contribute to a technical book.
• Hold a web conference in Minnesota.
• Implement more efficient development processes across entire corporations.

Long-Term Career Goals (5-10 years)

• Have sufficient residual income coming in to pursue personal projects.
• Have family and kids a higher priority (time-wise) than work.