How a small agency is creating its engineering career framework
I love helping individuals and teams grow and succeed and overcome bigger and more audacious challenges. It doesn't happen on autopilot, even with great people. Actually, having the best people makes it an even more difficult, but crucial, endeavour.
In this series, we peer inside one of the mechanisms that helps drive and shape the software engineering team at Brightec.
Like the finest clockwork mechanisms, carefully designed and finely tuned, a high-performing team depends on rock-solid alignment and expectation setting around roles, responsibilities and progression.
We take meticulous care to ensure that our production staff are always able to grow and evolve in their engineering and design capabilities and confidence and that Brightec provides a context for that over very long time horizons (years to decades).
In this short exploration of our career framework, we'll explore:
1. The Challenge: Is it useful for a small agency to have a career framework?
We don't frame career progression in terms of 'problems' and 'solutions', because having great people who want to develop and grow is not really a 'problem'! But it is a challenge and one we have to rise to. Let's start by looking at what our key motivations were as we started to frame that challenge.
Read more here: We want to articulate our job roles and responsibilities as effectively as our company culture.
2. The Thinking: How we as a small agency redefined our career framework
With the scope and importance of our mission to create a career framework for our software engineers, we couldn't have rested until we'd explored and researched every aspect possible. We looked extensively at different approaches and advice to draw on all the inspiration and experience we could before diving in ourselves.
Read more here: This blog is an insight into the thinking behind creating our new software engineering career framework.
3. The Approach: What engineering career framework works for our small agency?
At a certain point, you're as prepared as you're going to be, and it's time to be true to your convictions and commit. We settled on our approach and recodified our engineering roles and responsibilities.
Read more here: This blog outlines the career framework we settled upon for our software engineering team at Brightec.
4. The Rollout: How to implement a new career framework with your team and re-evaluate it post-launch
The articulation of Software Engineering roles we'd arrived at for Brightec is only really 'the end of the beginning' of the story. Reflecting on what we'd documented, we then thought deeply about how to introduce and implement the new career framework within the team. Since the 'launch', we look at what's changed, what hasn't, and the next steps and extensions in our near and far future.
Read more here: Once you've drafted your shiny new career framework – how do you roll it out?
We want to articulate our job roles and responsibilities as effectively as our company culture.
Looking for something else?
Search over 400 blog posts from our team
Want to hear more?
Subscribe to our monthly digest of blogs to stay in the loop and come with us on our journey to make things better!
