Where do you want to be in 5 years?
Featured Products Promotional FeaturesPosted by: Dental Design 19th January 2022
Though a question commonly asked during the interview phase for a new role, where you want to be in 5 years’ time is just as relevant at every stage of your career. In fact, regularly asking yourself what you want to do and what your goals are for the coming years will help to keep your professional journey on the right track.
Set your goals
Goal setting should not just be a tick box exercise. It can be very worthwhile when implemented thoughtfully, helping to focus your development and give you a target to aim for. Goals can be categorised into key groups – mastery approach goals, mastery avoidance goals, performance approach goals and performance avoidance goals.[i] Mastery-led goals involve setting out to accomplish a certain target – to score a particular mark, complete a specific course etc. Performance-led goals are about demonstrating competence in relation to colleagues or people around you – so you want to achieve above the average for the profession, for example. With regards to approach or avoidance, the former is striving for a positive result while the latter is avoiding a negative outcome.
So, why establish goals in the first place? Primarily, goals provide motivation to improve and encourage greater commitment from an individual or team. They provide a sense of direction and can help to shape development in the most productive way. Many psychologists that speak about the subject often cite the 1990 book by Locke and Latham entitled “A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance”, which lays out the benefits of goal-setting in great detail. It highlights the importance of setting clear goals that are challenging, that will be properly committed to, can be reviewed and complexity adjusted as needed.
Plan to achieve your goals
In dentistry, similar concepts can be applied to professional development so as to help clinicians advance with purpose. This may be applied to your Professional Development Plan (PDP) and therefore incorporated within your plan for enhanced CPD and additional training throughout upcoming years. Having short- and long-term goals will also help to shape your entire career while providing smaller stepping stones to help you get there.
Whether your aim is to be a well-accomplished general dental practitioner, or to have started down the path to a specialism in the next 5 years, Colosseum Dental UK offers the resources, opportunities and support you need to truly excel in your career. These include access to various CPD and other training programmes, as well as the chance to specialise in a discipline of your choice. We aim to be as flexible as possible to accommodate your changing needs as you grow. Ultimately, your new skills will provide a wider range and higher quality of dental treatment for our patients, and that’s something we will always wholeheartedly support.
The support you need
We can also help you to identify the right path for you and enable you to design your career progression for the coming years. With over 70 practices in the UK, we have an extensive network of clinicians with different backgrounds, ambitions and achievements. We also have a Clinical Care Board and others placed throughout our teams to provide bespoke support and guidance to our dentists. All of this means there is always someone to speak to, to bounce ideas off and to seek inspiration from in order to create the best plan of action for you.
At Colosseum Dental UK, we care more about our clinicians. We will listen to where you want to be in 5 years’ time, and we will be proactive in helping you achieve your goals. To keep your development at the centre of everything we do, providing high standards of clinical support, enabling professional development into a specialism and mentoring opportunities are all incorporated within our core promises to our dentists. We appreciate that your clinical capabilities and job satisfaction are integral to you being able to deliver the very best quality of patient care, so we are here to support you in every possible way.
A bright future
It is true that we require a certain amount of luck in life to get where we want to go. However, professional aspirations can always be realised with some careful forward planning and hard work. If you have an idea of what your career will look like in the next 5, 10 or 15 years, why not see how Colosseum Dental UK could help make your vision a reality?
For more information, please visit https://www.colosseumdental.co.uk/careers/job-opportunities/dentists
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[i]Elliot AJ, McGregor HA. A 2 x 2 Achievement Goal Framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2011; 80(3);501-519. DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.80.3.501
