February 26, 2024
The challenge
The client had challenges demonstrating real progression opportunities for their engineering talent. There was a feeling that to get ahead engineers had to move into people management roles and stop being technical. As a result engineering talent was leaving the organisation or moving into a role where they had lower motivation and capability resulting in the organisation losing engineering talent and gaining weaker people managers.
Our solution
Define clear career stages from graduate through to ‘Distinguished Engineer’, MD-equivalent levels, underpinned by a simple but powerful competency framework consisting of four key behavioural competencies that built organisational effectiveness and four technical competencies following the software delivery lifecycle.
Each career stage articulated the target level of each of the eight competencies needed at that stage; effectively demonstrating to engineers ‘what good looks like’ and supported by example personas to bring the career stages and competencies to life.
To ensure the career path provided value and became part of the development language of the organisation it was completely embedded across the employee lifecycle. This means it formed the basis of the competency criteria in:
- Recruitment
- Objective Setting
- Performance Reviews
- Promotion and Compensation
- Reward and Recognition Schemes
Another key success factor was clear ownership of competencies and roles in the career framework; allowing these owners to evolve the framework as the organisation evolved.
Our impact
- A measurable change in the engagement and motivation of engineers, resulting in a higher-performing function delivering better business outcomes
- An increased cohort of engineering talent role models at senior levels, having greater positive impact on engineering across the organisation
- The ability to more consistently and objectively assess capability across the engineering population
- Increased talent attraction & retention
