A lot of people mistake their resume to be a chronicle of their past glories and achievements. With educational qualifications, degrees earned and trainings undergone, your resume is reduced to a list of your history. However, there is a small section in there that allows you to do a little futuristic thinking and make it look like a forward looking document – the career goal statement. It should give, the potential employer, a general direction towards which you and your career are heading. Don’t mistake career objective to be something on the lines of ‘I want a job and am looking out to be employed in your organisation’! No, you couldn’t possibly be further away from the truth! Take the focus away from yourself and inform the prospective employer about how you could benefit him/her. Another common mistake would be when you write ‘seeking a challenging position.’ Good for you, but it does nothing to help the employer narrow you down as a prospect. Sitting on the fence and keeping your options open to almost any position just shows desperateness and this is not something that your resume should be portraying. Here are some tips and samples that you could refer to while drafting your resume.
Career Goal Statement Examples
- Customize your career goal statement to short term goals if you have customized your resume for a particular job profile. Keep the long-term career goals for the professional resume that you use for enquiring about job vacancies.
- The whole point is to mention ‘your’ own career goals. It is a personal statement about your passions and aspirations and hence, it is best to not just copy and paste from the internet or from your friend, for that matter.
- Figuring out what you want and desire from your work and the plans that you have set for yourself which will, in turn, help the organisation that you will be working for, is a good beginning. Note down the pointers in a notepad before finalising the resume.
- The career goals on a resume come at the very beginning. The purpose is to let the potential employer form an impression about you as a person before he/she begins reading your resume. What follows next has to be related. Sometimes, the career goal is set aside till the end. The reason being that the synopsis of the entire resume is given in the career goal. Both ways, keep the resume and your career goal connected.
- There are two ways to go about this – write your educational qualification, past achievements and references and then begin to compose the career goal. Or, keeping in mind the career goal, write the rest of the resume.
- Ideally, your career goal should be specific, flexible and definitely not rigid. This may all be highly confusing for you. An example could be as: being a computer engineer, you could think on the lines of ‘to utilize my skills to the best of my ability so as to contribute to the development of software programming’ and not ‘I want to work on XYZ (a specific programming language or domain)’. Give the organisation some flexibility to consider you for various positions within the computer programming positions itself.
- Here are a few examples for career goal statements that your could draw inspiration from.
Sales Representative’s Resume
To obtain a position of a sales representative in a pharmaceutical industry where, I can utilize my management and customer relations skills, with the prospect for performance-based advancement.
Fresher In Business Management
First-class university graduate, previously employed in fast-food service industry and aiming for a new position in Business Management. I'm looking forward to becoming a key-player in the organisation and utilizing my credentials to explore the many different career paths at ABC (Name of the organisation) and strive towards helping the organization become the best in the South-East region.
Search Engine Optimisation Expert
To secure a Search Engine Optimization position with a well established organization which has a stable environment where I can use my SEO skills and experience to increase site traffic and search engine placement.
Remembering not to promise more than you can deliver should stand you in good stead. Proofread your career goal in the context of your entire resume and look out for flowery language and casual words. All the best with your job search.
