Time to Tackle the Big Issues

So there you have it: you now have the tools and the motivation to define career progression for you, your team, and maybe even the whole department. If nothing like this exists at your company, then I encourage you to start this movement at your workplace. You should start by defining a progression framework with your team as an exercise to define how they see their roles and your own role. Then you can begin to invite others to see what you’ve been working on and see whether the network effect can bring about real change.

Career progression frameworks lower the barrier to enabling career progression discussions. They bring specificity to the skills and competencies that ICs and managers should be aiming toward, and enable those who’ve been too reserved to ask about what their future holds to have those conversations with greater ease.

Here’s what we’ve covered:

• We defined the role of individual contributor and considered what progression looks like on that track.

• Then we considered progression on the management track.

• Using the example progressions from those tracks, we saw how you can define competencies that can be mapped against roles. This allows you to create a career progression framework that is adaptable to your team and department.

• We then looked at some common bugs that arise around career progression frameworks and what you can do about them.

In the next chapter, we’re going to dive deep into an urgent and critically important issue with our industry: inclusivity and diversity. This is a crucial area in which we, as managers in technology, need to unite and make an impact.