Interviewers use the Career Objective section as a an ice breaker to start conversation with the candidate. It is the first thing that an interviewer notices when he scans your resume. As a first question in the interview, you are likely to be asked to explain your career objective. You are expected to give an answer convincing the interviewer that you have a serious plan for your professional life. If you fail to explain career objective in your resume, your rejection chances increase manifold.
From your answer, the interviewer tries to get a mental picture about you, as a future professional. The interviewer tries to understand: what is this candidate’s attitude towards work? Is she ambitious? Is she passionate? Does she have work ethic, or does she care for nothing than money?
Here are some points to keep in mind while writing career objective:
- Keep it simple. A good career objective doesn’t mean usage of flowery words.
- Write about your dream job environment. What would you do when you are given an offer to work for a dream company, to work in your favorite technologies?
- Any spelling mistake or grammatical mistake or formatting mistake there would give him a really bad impression about you.
- Try not to copy career objective from other resumes. Be original, write your own. Come on, can’t you write a single line in English describing “Your” career objective??!!
I do understand that if you have never written career objective yourself before, it seems pretty difficult to write it. Remember, it is a simple briefing of what you want from your work life.
Here are some questions that you could use to construct your career objective:
- How do you want to work? Do you want to work hard or do you want to work with passion or do you want to work for making a difference?
- What do you want to achieve in your professional life? Do you want to become an expert in a technical field or do you want to grow as a professional or do you want to innovate something?
- What type of work environment are you looking forward for? Do you want to work in a place where you are given space to be creative or do you want to work in a company with preset standards?
- Which role do you want to work for? What role are you aiming to reach in the near future?
Here are a couple of good examples for career objective:
- To become a web 2.0 expert
- To give my best to my employer organization
- To apply and enhance the technical skills I learnt in college in a corporate application
- To work for a multi national company and climb the corporate ladder to the highest position possible
I just got reminded of an incident. A friend of mine had written his career objective as “To become a successful professional”. The first question he was put by the interviewer was, “What is success according to you?”
My friend had a tough time convincing the interviewer about what success means to him.
So, understand that career objective leads to various questions and be prepared for it.
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the Editor of Interview Mantra. He is a student pursuing masters in International Institute of Information Technology. With over 4 years of IT experience, he is obsessed with software programming and computer technologies. He loves to see a software come to life in its development life cycle. He is a person who defies "mob mentality" and a deeply spiritual and a strong believer of moral values and righteousness. Through this website, he wishes to gather a large community of aspiring engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals from all parts of the globe. You can connect with him on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sridhar.j 
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