What are Performance Goals?
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Performance goals address specific aspects of your production when looking for a job. They can identify areas of improvement, provide direction on how to meet the goals you set and help you determine when they’ve been met. This article shares various examples of performance goals that you can use to evaluate your career progress and where you can enhance your skills.
What are performance goals?
Performance goals define accomplishments that you set to achieve. Writing your performance goals down will give you a guide to allocate your attention and resources to meeting or exceeding your goals. Your performance goals can be tied in with the organization’s, but they can also be listed on your resume once you accomplish them. Employers want to see metrics on your resume to see how you met and exceeded your performance goals, so they can determine if you’re the right fit for their organization.
Types of performance goals
A few types of performance goals include:
Goals that are essential to the job
The main objectives and specific tasks of a job are essential goals that are required by management. For example, a marketing coordinator’s goal can be to submit monthly reports on the performance of the department’s engagement on social media platforms while an accountant must report investors’ earnings by the end of the year. These goals reiterate the expectations to perform these tasks regularly and it personalizes your position by measuring the output needed considering your skills and prior experience.
Project goals
Project goals relate to the tasks that you need to perform from the beginning to the end of the project. They may expand past the duties originally shown in the job description for a position or communicated to you during an interview. Some examples of project goals you can set might be composed of product development, enhancing workflow processes, establishing a new program or completing a task that’s been in the pipeline for a while.
Professional development goals
Professional development goals outline what you’re striving to learn over the next 12 months. Goals can also be set over shorter or longer periods. You should add the professional development goals that you achieved on your resume and for the type of skills or program that you learned. The skill that you learned might be more important, but completing your training over a specific period shows your ability to be trainable and how you directly impacted the development of your organization.
Performance improvement goals
Performance improvement goals should be reserved for when you need to change your attitude and mindset to increase your output. Some of these goals consist of arriving to work on time, keeping client projects on-schedule or attending a webinar to improve your content writing skills. If you’re going to add the results from these goals on your resume, they must show tangible improvement over a given period.
Popular performance goals with examples
Here are some examples of the options you can consider when setting performance goals to enhance your career:
- Examples of goals that are essential to the job
- Examples of project goals
- Examples of professional development goals
- Examples of performance improvement goals
Examples of goals that are essential to the job
Goals that are essential to the job can be tied in with performance goals since they’re based on the job description.
- Deliver all department reports to the project manager
- Send the schedule of part-time employees to the human resources manager every week
- Submit all financial data to the Chief Financial Offer on the third Friday of each month
- Re-shelf the non-fiction section of the library every Thursday
- Drop off mail at all stops along the assigned route daily
- Write three articles and submit them to the project manager daily
- Edits articles as they come in from internal writers
- Schedule repairs for each vehicle that arrives at the shop
- Examine patients when they’re scheduled to come into the office
Examples of project goals
Project goals show the progress of completion from the beginning to the end.
- Increase the delivery of projects by 20% over the next month
- Reduce department waste and improve software quality by 30% over the next year
- Close four deals by the end of next week
- Increase customer satisfaction rates by 40% by the end of the year
- Expand client base by 10% to increase revenue by 25% over the next two years
- Use organic ingredients to bolster sales by 20% by the end of the quarter
- Improve the processing of software updates by five minutes
- Give out free metal straws to save the waste of 20 million plastic straws over the next year
- Scale the organization’s accounting software that saves $100,000 a year in administrative costs
- Initiate an e-commerce project to augment vendor turnaround time by 34%
Examples of professional development goals
You should consider each professional development goal a project skills to routinely learn and absorb new skills while boosting your performance.
- Finish a certification in project management by the end of year
- Complete a year-long computer training program to increase technical skills
- Ask for feedback from my manager on the last Friday of each month to properly evaluate my performance
- Attend a teamwork seminar with three coworkers next week
- Apply for the internal promotion at the end of the month
- Network with three marketing professionals at next week’s conference
- Enable spell checker on my browser to avoid spelling mistakes
- Invite coworkers to Happy Hour this Friday
- Volunteer at a local animal shelter this weekend
- Create a personal website that shows my published work
Examples of performance improvement goals
Performance improvement goals showcase where you need to elevate your output.
- Close five deals to increase your total from last month
- Finish 2,000 lines of code to exceed last week’s total
- Write an article over the weekend to increase output
- Change production processes to build 10% more cars by the end of next year
- Finish the design of two websites by the end of the month
- Cross-train an intern to create two presentations by the end of the week
- Create safety procedures to keep employees safe by the end of May
- Increase morale of all department employees before going on vacation
- Double employee participation in volunteer events
- Create training guides for all new hires by next year