An important part of career progression is goal-setting, or creating a list of milestones that you want to accomplish in the next weeks, months, and over the course of a year. Setting goals helps you organize your career thoughts and focus your work on the direction you want for your future.

Keeping track of these goals will help you hit the landmark you are gunning for:

Growing your professional network

Every piece of advice on networking harps on how important it is for your career and future job search, but few tell you how to actually make your networking efforts count. Proper and effective networking requires that you set a goal for yourself each month and work towards it with various networking-related activities. Utilizing social media also especially LinkedIn would be an effective approach.

Learn and help your team learn

Being part of a successful team is difficult if people don’t learn from each other. But often professionals get so wrapped up in their own work that they tend to ignore the help they can give to and get from their colleagues. Break out of this self-absorption by leading an effort to help people learn from each other.

You’ll find that collaborative learning with colleagues leads to some awesome, quick results.

Expanding your leadership skills

Upward mobility in the working world can only take you so far if you never want to move into leadership and management. So if you want to keep climbing up the career ladder, you’ll eventually come to a point where the next logical step in your field is management. That transition will become a whole lot easier if you already have leadership experience under your belt, so set a goal to actually get that done as early as possible in your career.

At the end of each month, take stock of all the tasks and projects you worked on. Tick off the ones you took the lead on and add a few notes on what you did, how it went, and what you learned. Mark the ones you could have done more with and make a game plan to increase your output next month.