Career ladder: worth the effort?

Definition

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a career ladder is a series of jobs from the lower paid with less responsibility to the highest paid with the most responsibility within a company or particular profession.

For our purpose, the software engineer career ladder is a transparent framework that enables us to have meaningful conversations with reports around the expectations of each position in the organisation and how to plan their advance on the career ladder.

A career ladder outlines the skills, competencies, and responsibilities required for each level. It is NOT a checklist for promotion. People will be weaker in some areas and stronger in others. Not all areas are equally important for promotion. Use it as a tool to have conversations about the career of the report and which weaknesses he/she can work on or pay attention to.

Benefits

Benefits for Employee:

• Clear Career Path: It creates a clear path for engineers to advance in their careers, by outlining the skills, competencies and responsibilities required for each level. This enables them to identify areas for growth and track progress.
• (More) Objective Performance Evaluation: It allows for a more objective performance evaluation by providing specific criteria, rather than subjective opinions or biases. It allows for promotions to be based on merit and achievement of specific milestones.
• Improved Retention and Employee Satisfaction: A clearly defined career path demonstrates the organisation’s commitment to professional development and growth of its employees. It can help to retain top talent by offering them opportunities for advancement and recognition. Knowing this path to advancement can motivate engineers to take on new challenges, acquire new skills and contribute more to the organisation.

Benefits for Organisation:

• Talent Management: The ladder helps with identifying, hiring, and promoting talent based on specific skills and experiences needed for each role. It allows to identify areas of investment in skills development and training programs. It can also help with aligning compensation with performance and responsibility levels and therefore promote equity.
• Resource Allocation: By understanding individual capabilities and aspirations, the manager can decide better on giving assignments to the right persons. It also eases the formation of teams to bring the needed capabilities together.
• Expectation Management: As a communication tool, a lot of discussions are avoided with the reports. It is clear what is expected from a certain role, and the focus can be more on the future of the employee and how growth can be achieved.

Caveats

• Specific for one organisation: Each organisation has its own unique needs, culture and goals. Roles, titles and levels are also specific in this area. All of this needs to be reflected in the framework. Not all organisations benefit from having a career ladder.
• Complexity: It requires a lot of time and effort to create and maintain an effective ladder as it keeps to be up to date with your organisation’s evolution.
• Subjectivity: It improves objective evaluation during performance reviews, but subjective views still occur. It can help structure good 1:1 conversations, feedback from peers and a self-evaluation.
• Expectations: Although it is not a checklist for Promotions. Employees will see it as that. Clear and repeated communication about the goals of the framework and how promotions are handled is needed.
• Dead matter: Make sure that it is not only a document, but it is actively used in the organisation. It can be discussion points on 1:1s, it has to be part of the talent management and demonstrated by coaching, mentoring and supporting development efforts.