Whether you’re an employee working on your personal development goals, or a leader looking to transform your people into high performers, a career goals template is the perfect place to start. Goal-setting is challenging at the best of times, and having research-based professional goals examples that align with OKR best practices can really help employees shape and refine their goals.
The content and structure of our goals have a huge impact on our chances of success - for example, we know that 91% of goals in high-performing companies are linked to company priorities (1). Between metrics and timelines, goal difficulty and goal alignment, there’s a lot to consider, so we don’t advise creating personal development goals from scratch, unless you’re really experienced.

A career goals template helps employees write better personal developmental goals, faster, but it’s important to remember that goal-focused one-to-one meetings between employee and manager play a key role too. You can learn more about these here.
And if you’re looking for more information on using the OKR (objective and key results) framework, you’ll find it here.
Now let’s dive into the sample goals!
Contents
1. What are Personal Development Goals?
2. Why Should Employees Set Personal Development Goals?
3. How Often Should Employees Set Personal Development Goals?
4. What are Professional Development Goals Examples?
5. Why Should Employees Use a Career Goals Template?
6. Career Goals Template: 17 Personal Development Goals Examples
Personal developmental goals are goals that relate to an employee’s career advancement. The word personal is used to indicate that the goal is unique to the employee, and not a shared goal with team members, rather than indicating that a goal relates to the employee’s personal life.
Personal development goals are used to identify and track career objectives like improving communication skills, completing a training program or gaining experience.
Setting personal developmental goals is essential for tracking and progressing professional growth - it’s something all employees should do when they’re looking to advance their career.
But personal development goals aren’t just for employees looking to sprint towards a leadership position. On the contrary, employees at all levels of the organisation, and with all kinds of career aspirations should participate in setting developmental goals.
Whether employees are looking to develop skills that will help them excel in their current role, make a non-linear move to a different department or industry, or advance to a new position on their career path, personal developmental goals can help them get there.
The cadence around setting career goals depends on whether employees are most interested in short, medium or long-term goals, or a mix of all three. But, as a general rule, personal developmental goals should be set at least once a year and reviewed quarterly to make any necessary tweaks.
Many teams like to create career development goals in alignment with their company’s performance review schedule. Performance reviews offer an opportunity to focus on longer-term goals, but this isn’t always the case. If you’re looking for long-term goal examples for performance reviews, you'll find them in our downloadable career goals template.
Professional development goals examples are goal-setting tools that help employees, managers and leaders improve the quality of their goals, and, in turn, improve individual and team performance.
They're sample goals that illustrate what employee career development goals should look like, and provide inspiration on the content of these goals.
Working from a career goals template is beneficial for lots of reasons:
- It shows employees what a “good” goal should look like
- It provides inspiration for objectives that are ambitious, yet achievable
- It provides a formula that employees can follow for the first draft of their goals
- It’s less intimidating than starting with a blank page

Objective: Improve my feedback skills
Key Results:
Read “Feedback and Performance at Work”
Request feedback from a teammate 2 times per month
Deliver quick praise 2 times per week
Apply the Radical Candor model to constructive feedback
Hold 1 casual check-in per month with direct reports
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Objective: Accelerate my AI Chatbot learning
Key Results:
Spend 1 hour per week developing prompts for marketing projects
Subscribe to 2 newsletters that share AI chatbot prompts
Complete 1 article using an AI chatbot
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Objective: Build a strong professional network
Key Results:
Attend 2 local startup founder meet-ups
Send 50 LinkedIn invitations to founders whose work you admire
Meet 2 LinkedIn connections for a face-to-face coffee
Join 2 online communities for startup founders
Publish 1 Twitter thread per week on founder-related topics
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Objective: Become proficient in Excel
Key Results:
Watch 16 Microsoft Excel training videos
Shadow accounting team for 2 monthly budget sessions
Create 3 Excel sheets using only keyboard shortcuts
Complete 2 data analysis projects through Excel
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Objective: Improve my time efficiency
Key Results:
Spend 30 minutes each week creating a weekly plan
Spent 15 minutes each day reviewing a daily plan
Attend 3 coaching sessions with a team mate with great time management skills
Trial the Pomodoro technique for 1 week
Trial the 52/17 technique for 1 week
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Objective: Improve my public speaking skills
Key Results:
Complete Google Open Classroom public speaking course
Attend 2 coaching sessions with a team mate with great public speaking skills
Guest on 1 podcast relevant to my role
Deliver a 15-minute presentation at All Hands
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Objective: Build stronger relationships with my direct reports
Key Results:
Read Radical Candor by Kim Scott and apply key principles
Give quick praise 2 times per week
Complete weekly 1:1 meetings with all direct reports for 1 month
Schedule a casual monthly check-in with all direct reports
Attend 2 work social gatherings
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Objective: Communicate more efficiently with my team mates
Key Results:
Complete Figma training
Initiate all project-based communications on Figma or Trello
Reduce Slack usage to <5 messages per day
Schedule all non-urgent messages for team's preferred hours
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Objective: Grow understanding of Dev team workflows
Key Results:
Attend daily Dev team stand up for 1 month
Attend 3 monthly Dev team planning sessions
Perform manual testing of 12 bug fixes and report back to Dev team
Complete a monthly 1:1 with Dev Team Lead
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Objective: Become a recognised expert in Cyber Security
Key Results:
Complete an MBA in cybersecurity management
Publish 1 article per week on LinkedIn
Publish 1 Twitter thread per week
Speak at 2 cybersecurity events
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Objective: Develop my organisational skills
Key Results:
Move all task management to Trello
Reduce missed tasks by 40%
Use Frankli Tasks to set reminders
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Objective: Refresh my mobile app development knowledge
Key Results:
Attend 1 mobile app development bootcamp
Complete 40 hours of on-the-job learning
Complete 3 coaching sessions with a member of the mobile dev team
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Objective: Become an active listener
Key Results:
Read 1 book on active listening
Reduce speaking time in 1:1 meetings by 10%
Create 5 new 1:1 meeting templates featuring open-ended questions
Create a calendar block before every meeting to reduce distractions
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Objective: Obtain GDPR and data protection certification
Key Results:
Complete GDPR and data protection course
Achieve 80% or higher on final test
Update qualification details in Frankli
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Objective: Improve my goal-setting skills
Key Results:
Read Setting Goals that Deliver Results
Attend 2 goal-setting workshops
Complete 4 goal-drafting session with manager
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Objective: Improve my written communication skills
Key Results:
Attend 2 internal communications workshops
Publish 2 LinkedIn posts per week
Use ChatGPT prompts to reduce written communication word counts by 40%
Switch to written status updates for 3 months
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Objective: Gain basic graphic design skills
Key Results:
Take Canva for Beginners course
Create 10 sample website graphics using Canva template
Action feedback on website graphics from design team
Assist content team in creating 1 promotional handbook
Create and deliver 1 presentation
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Sources:
1. McKinsey and Company, How effective goal-setting motivates employees.