ResumeWeAssist Enterprise

Being a subscriber of LinkedIn Learning & Development group couple of months back, I came across a discussion about S.M.A.R.T as a prehistoric method of goal setting process and should be replaced with V.I.S.T.A. Many chiped in their responses and shared their thoughts about S.M.A.R.T and V.I.S.T.A. Overall, there is a mix reaction but overall agreed S.M.A.R.T & V.I.S.T.A have their own advantages & disadvantages.

That triggered me to share my thoughts about S.M.A.R.T & V.I.S.T.A especially on their practical application in your job search. Throughout this article, I’ll be covering my personal perspective on how to leverage S.M.A.R.T and/or V.I.S.T.A to set your career goal, the fundamental thing to do before starting your job search. Don’t worry if you do not know what S.M.A.R.T and V.I.S.T.A mean, I’ll elaborate more in the next paragraph.

What is S.M.A.R.T and V.I.S.T.A? For those who are familiar with goal setting process, I’m sure you have heard about S.M.A.R.T. Basically S.M.A.R.T is an acronym of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Timely. Maybe some of you will have a slightly different acronym but more or less many will agree with me. While V.I.S.T.A stands for Visual, Inspiration, Specific, Timely & Assessable. To be honest, after reading that discussion in LinkedIn, that was the first time I read about V.I.S.T.A and started to give some thoughts about it. For me S.M.A.R.T is still relevant in today’s goal setting scenario and V.I.S.T.A acts as a complimentary to S.M.A.R.T but covering more on the emotional part of the goal setting process. Both were created with the same objective and it all depends on us as a user to optimize our goal setting process using S.M.A.R.T and/or V.I.S.T.A. To learn more about S.M.A.R.T & V.I.S.T.A practical application in your career goal setting process, move on to the next paragraph.

Let me start on how to use S.M.A.R.T in our career goal setting process. Firstly, S stands for Specific. To achieve a goal, you will need to be Specific. As what Stephen R. Covey shared in his bestseller book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit #2 is “Start With the End in Mind”. You will need to start with the knowing of what you want to achieve specifically. In your career, maybe you want to grow your career. Having that as your career goal is not specific enough. A specific career goal for instance is to grow my career as a department manager. Next, M for Measurable. To achieve a specific career goal, it must be measurable. A measurable career goal should be “ To grow my career as a department manager in the next 3 years”. A for Achievable is a question you should ask yourself if your specific & measurable career goal is achievable or not? If your working experience is at entry level, then having this career goal is not achievable but if you are at a 1st level managerial role with several years experience than it is achievable. Moving on to R which is Relevant. This is to gauge if your career goal is relevant to what or where you are working. If the current company you are working do not have a department manager role then that career goal is not relevant. Maybe you will need to move out from that company and find a suitable company that can provide you that department manager role. Finally, T for Timely. For this example, Timely is the same as Measurable where you want to be a department manager in the next 3 years. Just to illustrate how you can use Timely in your career goal; if your measurable career goal is to increase your salary by 20%. Then for the Timely portion, you can add on “to increase your salary by 20% in the next 2 years”. I hope this simple illustration will give an idea how to use S.M.A.R.T to set your career goal.

Now, let me add on V.I.S.T.A into our career goal setting process. V stands for Visual, which is to leverage our imagination to come out our career goal. As I mentioned before, V.I.S.T.A covers the emotional part of goal setting process and that is why it starts with V for Visual and I for Inspiration. As we are aware, inspiration influence our motivation to take action and it is also a very powerful influence. Inspiration will only come if we can visualize our career goal. To illustrate an example, let me use the career goal example from S.M.A.R.T, which is to grow my career. You will need to visualize that you have grown your career to the next level; to whatever level it is i.e. from Entry Engineer to Senior Engineer, 1st Level Manager to Department Manager and etc. Once you visualize it and if you really want it, you will automatically get inspired to achieve it. To ease your visualization & inspiration process, you will need to be S for Specific. Similar to what you have gone thru in S.M.A.R.T; similarly in V.I.S.T.A, it will help so much to be specific in you career goal setting process. Then followed by T for Timely i.e, by when you want to achieve your career goal. Finally, followed by A which is Assessable. Again, similar to A: Achievable & R: Relevant in S.M.A.R.T, it will be effective to challenge your career goal setting process by assessing if it is achievable and relevant to your career. With that we have finished our career goal setting process using S.M.A.R.T and/or V.I.S.T.A.

There is a famous saying ” If you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail”. It is very true in whatever you want to do especially in your career planning. S.M.A.R.T and/or V.I.S.T.A is just a tool which is totally useless if you do not know how to leverage that tool. Learning how to use it and actually practicing their application is the key to your success. If you have any questions or experience to share for discussion, please ask & share, that is one of the best way to learn. Good luck!!