Every interview is a "sales presentation", during which you may be asked about your plans for the future. And if you haven't prepared an effective response, you can easily miss a golden opportunity to sell yourself.

Question: One of the toughest interview questions I have had to answer in the past is "Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years?" My answers never seem to come out right. Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated!

Answer: Perhaps you have difficulty with questions about the future because you haven't actually thought about your goals, or thought about them deeply enough to be able to state them clearly to a relative stranger who has a vested interest in your reply.

Interviewers ask questions like, Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?, for several reasons. The most obvious of these is to see whether or not you have thought about the future, whether you have goals and a concrete plan to accomplish them. However, interviewers sometimes probe around issues of this kind in an attempt to discover if you are an active "self-manager", someone who plans and thinks ahead. They may also be trying to assess whether or not the opportunity that's available fits your aspirations.

Your challenge, as you prepare for interviews, is to come up with ways to answer questions about your future honestly and in such a manner as to satisfy your interviewer's curiosity and yet not paint yourself into a corner.

Most of us have aspirations and dreams for the future although we don't always take time to articulate them clearly. If this is your situation, set aside a couple of hours for reflection. Think deeply about how you would like to spend the next decade or so. What do you want to accomplish in this next phase of your working life? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? n ten years?

Once you have a fairly clear picture of the work and lifestyle you'd prefer during the next decade of your life, bring it into sharp focus by writing down your goals.

Shawn Shepheard and Dennis Tao, two career practitioners who present workshops on goal setting, make a distinction between "performance goals" and "outcome goals".

Outcome goals tend to focus on a specific result and are generally subject to chance and the actions of others, they say. Performance goals, on the other hand, focus on the learning you need to do and the actions that need to taken to achieve your own end.

From your brief letter it's difficult to know your actual goals. However, I'll try to read between the lines a bit to give you an example of how you might answer interview questions about your future plans.

When asked about future goals, discuss your plans in terms of your performance goals. This would go something like: "As you know, I've been in the _______ industry for ______ years and I intend to stay in the field and expand my knowledge and expertise, specifically in the _________ side of the business. This appeals to me because the __________ experience I've gained over the years has given me invaluable insight into customer needs and I believe I'm uniquely positioned to _______________."

"Over the next five to ten years, I plan to become a top performer in an established firm. I also intend to become more involved in our professional association and upgrade my skills. I am particularly interested in building my skills in _______________ because________. "

Preparing to discuss performance goals such as these can add polish to your sales presentation. You won't commit yourself to a particular course of action that might prove to be inappropriate. And you'll give interviewers a deeper sense of what you have to offer and how you approach your own career growth and development.

At the same time, as Shepheard and Tao point out, "Goals based on personal performance or skills or knowledge to be acquired give you 100 per cent control of your success or failure."