New Year’s Resolution – Get That Job in 2015

If you are finishing your Pharm D and planning to look for work soon, or if you are planning to leave your current job for another one, you will naturally have to begin with a job search.

To start your job search, you will first have to set some goals. But setting goals involves more than simply writing down a wish list. To be really useful, your goals need to satisfy several conditions. Those conditions are spelled out in what is known as the SMART criteria. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.

Your goals should satisfy each of these conditions if they are going to help you in your job search:

Specific.
Again, this means more than just setting a goal of finding a job. Specific means something clear and concrete, such as reworking your resume by Friday of this week.

Measurable.
You should be able to measure your goals. For example, saying that you are going to network really cannot be measured. But, setting a goal of attending four networking events this month, or contacting 10 people this week are goals that can be measured, so you know clearly whether you are reaching your goal or not.

Achievable.
Your goals need to be ones you can reach. Having a goal of finding a job within a week or two is clearly an unrealistic goal. Setting goals that are unrealistic will do more harm than good because your chance of reaching such goals is small, which will only sap your morale.

The best course of action is to begin with goals that you can readily achieve, and then grow from there.

Realistic.
Your goals need to be realistic. You need to be honest about what is really doable. For example, deciding to go for a position as President of a pharmaceutical company isn’t a realistic goal if you have no experience with profit and loss, marketing, sales and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Timely.
You need to attach deadlines to your goals, and then try really hard to meet those deadlines. Otherwise, your goals remain as vague desires that you may get to sometime in the future.

In formulating your goals, you want to decide on your big picture goal first – where you want to ultimately end up. Then work backward from there, deciding on your long-term goals and coming up with a roadmap on how to get there.

If one of your goals for 2015 is finding a new pharmacy position, contact the pharmacy recruiters at Rx relief®. We look forward to helping you make 2015 your best year yet!