Goals & action planning
What are your existing skills?
Think about what skills you have – there will be more than you think!
- People skills: being understanding, being emotionally intelligent, being sociable, helping others, speaking clearly, leadership, giving feedback
- Activities: making decisions, being creative, setting priorities, ICT skills, problem solving, languages, numbers
- Personal: managing self, learning from mistakes, staying calm, being assertive, determination
You also develop skills in your personal life, e.g. comparing different opinions and decision making.
Academic Skills
Below there are lists of academic skills, think about which ones you think are a priority for you to develop:
- Organising myself for study
- Using study time well
- Thinking creatively
- Solving problems
- Reading for academic purposes
- Searching for information for assignments
- Making and using notes
- Making good use of lectures
- Memory skills
- Preparing for exams/taking exams
- Evaluating my work & using feedback
- Contributing to group work
- Presenting
- Managing writing tasks
- Using academic style in writing
- Writing reports and dissertations
- Undertaking a research project
- Avoiding plagiarism
- Citing sources and writing references
- Thinking critically and analytically
- Evaluating arguments
SMART targets
Are your targets SMART?
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- Specific – Targets need to be clear and achievable
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- Measurable – Vague targets like: ‘I need to study more’ are not useful to you. How will you measure ‘more’?
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- Achievable – How will you know you have done ‘more’? When will you start? Being specific will help your goals become achievable.
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- Realistic – To make this target realistic you need to identify how much ‘more’ you are able to do e.g. Could you do 2 hours per day?
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- Time-related – So a more reasonable target might be: “I will study for 2 hours per day starting from today until my exams”.
Example: “I will complete my essay introduction (200 words) by 9p.m. this evening”
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- Specific: Write the introduction
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- Measurable: I can count the words
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- Achievable: I’ve already planned the content so I should have the knowledge to complete the introduction
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- Realistic: It is not too difficult to write 200 words in one evening
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- Time-related: by 9pm
Flexibility
You need to allow some flexibility in the targets, for example, if you get interrupted and don’t finish a task, extend the ‘deadline’.
Monitor targets regularly to see if they are working. If not, change them. Perhaps you were being unrealistic.
Final example: Write a 250-300 word introduction by 3p.m. today (to be handed in at 6p.m. in 2 days’ time)
Setting yourself targets
- Think about what skills you have and what you wanted to improve
- How are you going to improve them?
- What are you going to do and when?
- How will you know when you have improved?
- Identify at least 2 targets you would like to achieve this term
- Are they SMART?