Advantages of learning vs. performance goals

Learning and performance goals are unique objectives for professionals to achieve success in their organization. The key differences are:

• Focus: Learning goals focus on long-term achievements, such as professional development. Performance goals focus on short-term achievements that prove your skills or competency.
• Duration to accomplish the goal: Typically, you can accomplish a performance goal more quickly than a learning goal.
• Benefits: Learning goals often help you achieve your aspirations, while performance goals help you contribute to the success of a team and your company.
• Uses: Both types of goals provide personal benefit, but a learning goal is typically for personal use and a performance goal is often set by others for you to follow.

What are learning goals?

Learning goals focus on developing skills and advancing your knowledge for professional development. You can set these goals for long-term success rather than short-term accomplishment. For example, an engineer may pursue their professional licensing and volunteer for more responsibilities on a project so they can develop skills to become a project manager. This is a learning goal since it focuses on developing skills and advancing your career.To design learning goals, it’s useful to consider your career plan and how you could improve in the future. You can also ask your employer about opportunities to advance and learn about the qualifications you need for higher-level roles.

What are performance goals?

Performance goals focus on an outcome. For example, a goal to make a certain number of sales by a deadline is a performance goal. A specific score on an exam is also a good example of a performance goal. These types of goals help determine competency and ability to perform certain tasks. Performance goals are short term and help achieve an objective in a smaller duration of time than a learning goal.Align your performance goals to the business objectives of the company. Often, a manager or supervisor sets performance goals, but you may create personal goals to improve your own job performance.

Advantages of learning goals

The primary benefit professionals receive from setting and achieving learning goals is career advancement. Pursuing goals to grow your skill set increases your flexibility as an employee and helps you become a more valuable member of the team. Creating learning goals to develop leadership skills, for example, can help managers recognize your potential and offer you opportunities to lead projects. If there aren’t opportunities to advance at your place of employment, enhancing your skills can attract the attention of other employers.Learning goals also provide excellent motivation to pursue future career goals and encourage you to continue your efforts to succeed. These goals are long term and help maintain focus as you achieve smaller goals on your path to career advancement.

Advantages of performance goals

Performance goals are more representative of your current abilities and offer several benefits that you can enjoy more quickly than learning goal benefits. For example, performance goals help improve the processes you and your team use to complete tasks. This makes you more efficient and enables you to become more productive. For example, your performance goal may be to increase customer acquisitions by 10%. In achieving this, you and your team can analyze the practices that were most successful in converting more consumers to your business and use these methods in future strategies to gain more customers rapidly.Accomplishing performance goals can help increase job satisfaction. Since these are mostly short-term goals, you achieve results quickly and gain satisfaction from accomplishing a task. Feeling a sense of accomplishment is encouraging and helps you to enjoy your work and see the value of your labor.

When can you use learning goals?

Here are examples of when to use a learning goal:

Increase motivation

A learning goal helps focus on your process and abilities rather than achieving a certain result. This may relieve stress and help you become more successful. If you find it challenging to meet performance goals, try setting learning goals to help build the talents you need to achieve performance goals.The focus on future objectives can increase your motivation and encourage you to strive to accomplish your tasks. Learning goals are more personal than performance goals, which also may give you more motivation because the reward is for personal gain.

Plan for your career

When planning your career path, you may use learning goals to help you reach important milestones. For example, as a student, you may create learning goals to help prepare you for licensure exams, then to advance your career, you may plan to develop leadership skills so that you can become a manager. Learning goals are well-suited to long-term achievements relating to professional development.