We’ve All Heard of Marketing Goals and Objectives For Business… But One For Me?
Just about everyone who has had any experience in business has been a part of a meeting or meetings that discuss and detail the marketing efforts of a company and how they are going to go about gaining business – feet in the door, accounts in the bank, or whatever colliquialism you want to use for it. As an accounting professional you have an important role in the analytics and the gauging of the efforts effectiveness verses the expense of implementing the marketing plan.
So why not apply this to your own career? Do you have a professional marketing plan? Having a marketing plan for your career can do two main things for you; 1) When you are writing down your Career Marketing Plan you will be able to set your milestones for accomplishments as well as promotions, pay increases, and training. 2) Clarity of your wants and desires for your career will bec a boost in what you do daily and will allow you to better identify once you do or do not attain that goal.
The following is what you could use to develop your own professional marketing plan:
– First you need to determine what you hope to accomplish through your career marketing efforts. It’s important to be as specific as possible because once you state your goals you can use them later as a measure of your success. The focus of your career actions will become more clear, and your everyday activities that you undertake will then have a purpose. – Once you have created the road map you wish to follow with your career marketing plan, you need to create your “game plan” on how you are going to get from milestone to milestone. When you do this you will often find that there are things that you may have not considered before but are essential to achieving your ultimate goal. – Clarify each career marketing objective, that’s a key concern in writing your goals and objectives: are they measurable, meaning, can you determine later whether or not you’ve achieved them? For example, saying you want to be more successful is not necessarily something you can measure later on. But saying you want to be managing 5 employees by a certain time is. And be realistic. Setting unrealistic goals will only discourage you as you move forward. This may require you to do more research; what are some realistic expectations for growth in a career such as yours?
Measuring the Competition
This will also require a little research on your competitors. No we aren’t suggesting that you should treat everyone else as “enemy combatants” ready to push the nuke button at any time. Rather when you see the qualifications that it takes to be in the positions you imagine for yourself and what others may have, it will give you a better understanding the education and training you would need to gather for yourself to be able to attain similar feats. This is also a good exercise to see what others in your industry with your same skill sets are receiving as a wage, and how you could be above the curve or under it when it comes to your pay. A Singapore auditor may have sound salary but you should not compare yourself to other professionals. Additionally, this can help determine how you can set yourself apart from the others that are in your profession. With unique training, or experience, or know-how you will be able to find your career niche that could make all the difference. All this will give you the competitive advantage in your career marketing efforts.
Reverse Engineer Your Career Goals
Again, be specific. Your marketing plan and your game plan to achieve what you develop for your career path are essential to that person you see yourself being, the responsibilities you see yourself having, and the life you see yourself living in the future. All be accomplished with a well-developed career marketing plan. A strategy that has been used quite often is reverse engineering. When you apply it to your career, you can look at the answer you would like to get, the destination you would like to find yourself in and reverse engineer on how to get to that place from where you are now standing. By doing so you can better plan how you can accomplish what you hope to. With this in place you can better project your future actions and career moves and possibly better estimate the road your career needs to travel to attain what you have imagined for yourself.
UAC Can Help You Develop a Career Marketing Plan
Universal Accounting Center understands that the best of careers start with the right type of training. The Start Today DVD is designed to help those of us who are career marketing-challenged. For just $9.95 you can learn how you can take the proverbial bull by the horns and get your career into high gear. You’re less than $10.00 away from learning which strategies are best for those pursuing a career and business in Accounting and Bookkeeping. Order today!
