Progression Framework
Learn what a career progression framework is and how to successfully implement it in your organization.
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Creating a progression framework
If a career progression framework isn’t already available at your company or if you would like to supplement the existing one with team-specific details, the following exercise is a lot of fun. It also offers opportunities for you to increase your influence in your department, as other teams, or maybe even the whole department, can help develop it further.
Before we discover how to do it, it’s worth mentioning what career progression frameworks are and aren’t for. To begin with, they are there to:
- Help your staff talk to you about where they feel they currently are in their career and what skills they would like to work on
- Stimulate conversation about where they would like to progress to in the future
- Set expectations of where they might go if they continue to perform well at the company
Frameworks should act as a compass, meaning a general direction that allows the user to find their own way, rather than a GPS, a specific route to follow whether you like it or not. Here’s what the career progression framework isn’t meant to do
- Rank staff against each other
- Prevent people from progressing
- Force anyone to progress in ways that they don’t want to do
In this section, we’ll go through an example of building out a subset of a career progression framework for ICs and managers. You can then work this into a more complete framework that suits your team and your company. This will enable your staff to have easier conversations about career progression and will allow you to have more fruitful conversations about your own career progression with your manager.
The grid
A career progression framework is a grid that consists of roles across the top and competencies down the side. They should be defined in a way that doesn’t make them specific checkboxes to tick to unlock a promotion. Instead, they’re meant to serve as a guide to your staff and yourself when having regular discussions about progression within the company.
The individual contributor track
Let’s take a subset of the roles that we listed for the IC track previously: junior engineer, engineer, and senior engineer. Those go along the top of the grid. Down the side will be the competencies. However, what should those be? That’s up to you, your team, and your department to define them.
Here are some examples of competencies that you could use:
- Professional experience: How long has somebody been working in this role in general? Have they recently graduated from college or are they a seasoned professional?
- Technical knowledge: Are they an expert in a number of technologies, or are they beginning their