Everyone knows that the New Year means setting new goals, be it saving for that vacation holiday or spending more time with friends and family. Its also a super time to set goals for your career.

Some simple ways to look at how to achieve your Career Goals include:

1 -Try and Establish a vision for where you want your career to go.Are you an engineer that wants to develop further to become a Senior Engineer, or a Technical Leader? Do you aspire to be Manager? Or are you like me, a talent acquisition specialist that has been working in the role for 10 years that wants to diversify and build different skills.

2 -Determine what actions support your career goals. What do you want to achieve this year? Do you want to increase your sales quota by 50%? Do you want to get a certification in your area of speciality? Write these goals on paper. Evaluate the skills you are good at or would like to improve and set those objectives for the year! By having your goals on paper, it will help you better meet the goals that you want to achieve.

3 -Show your goals to your manager.At Cisco, we use something called MyDevelopment Space to help evaluate our skills and goals. We also then sit down with our manager and work out a personal development plan based on those goals. It would be good for you to talk with YOUR Manager as well, because they may have some ideas on action items to help you achieve your goals.

4 -Set some short-term goals as well.Once you have established what your career goals are and you have worked out your personal development plan , set some short -erm goals. By breaking bigger goals down into small achievable goals, this will motivate you to take on other challenges as you start checking off items.Things to ask yourself include:  What do you you need to do to achieve your larger goals? What plans do you need to put in place? Do you need to learn new skills?Consider as many short-term goals that you can achieve and DO IT! This will help you achieve your ultimate long-term goal.

5 -Set a timeline.By setting clearly defined goals with an "achieve by" date, you can measure your progress and continuously motivate yourself to keep going.

6 -Be realistic.We all want to win the lottery, but that's not a realistic way to success. Set achieveable goals, so you don't get frustrated and quit working towards them all together.

Once you have achieved your career goals, build on what you have learned and use your skills! Network with other colleagues and Leaders and share your achievements and goals that you have reached. Be bold and maybe look for that promotion or secondment!

Is your goal to work for Cisco? Check out open positions.