Make 2024 Your Best Year in Your Public Affairs Career
Unlock the secrets to planning your year ahead with our guide tailored for Public Affairs professionals, EU campaigners, and lobbyists - are you ready to make 2024 your greatest year yet?
Few people don’t know the answer to this simple question:
Where do you want to be in your career?
And only a small minority of people have the answer to this next one:
Do you have a plan to get there?
Guess what happens to these people? They passively float at the surface of their career, hoping the current will bring them somewhere better than they have been so far.
I am certain you can guess where this path leads to:
Frustration (on oneself and others)
Boredom
Disengagement
Burnout (or Bore-out)
There is another path. One that requires a map, a plan.
With this guide, I’ll help you define this plan by selecting the goals that excite you and tracking their advancement over the year.
Plus, this guide has been specifically designed for Public Affairs professionals, EU campaigners and lobbyists. If you come from another industry, please feel free to make adjustments.
Let’s make 2024 the absolute best year of your career (so far), advancing towards objectives you genuinely care about.
Goal setting for success
Today, we will craft goals you will love to work towards in 2024.
I took inspiration from Ali Abdaal’s Wheel of Life, which I slightly modified for the Public Affairs industry. The idea is to list the different areas of your job and rate them. Then, your goal is to improve on the low-performing areas, keeping in mind that “the journey is what matters.”
Here is how to get started:
Draw a circle, and divide it into five slices for each of the five pillars of Public Affairs: EU policymaking knowledge, technical expertise, Marketing know-how, Business acumen, and Data management skills.
Grade each area on a scale from 0 to 10, representing how happy you feel about this specific skill.
Underline the three areas you'd like to improve on in 2024.
It should look like something like this:
Finally, for the three items you selected, find a success you'd like to celebrate by the end of the year. For me, that'd be "This year, I'd be happy to celebrate having read 2 textbooks about policymaking" or "identifying and keeping track of the key data in my work."
You have your goal. Now let’s go work on it.
Done with your goal setting? I would be grateful if you could share one or two in the comments below. Who knows? a reader of The Beubble might be able to help you out.
Keeping track of your efforts
I encourage you to pause through this article and define your goals for 2024 now.
Once that’s done, let’s continue.
I usually divide my year into Quarters, Months, and Weeks. For each of my goals, I would create declinations for each quarter, month, etc.
For instance, let’s take the goal of reading 1 to 2 textbooks about EU policymaking this year. A quarterly division would be:
Q1: Start identifying and reading the first book.
Q2: Finish book 1 and make a blog post about it.
Q3: Start reading book 2.
Q4: Finish book 2 and make a blog post about it.
Alright, you see where I’m going with that. At the start of every month, I’d do the same exercise. If book 1 has 24 chapters, then I can read four chapters a month, or A chapter per week. You get the idea.
I keep track of these milestones on a Notion page, but any tool is fine, as long as it’s the right one for you.
Then again, I would be glad if you’d like to share your goals with us in the comments below. What drives you this year? Where do you want to grow? Let us know and we’ll do our best to help and support you.
Thank you for reading The Beubble in 2023. In 2024, we’ll go further and farther.
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