Every so often, we ask ourselves what’s next in career. In the agile delivery setting, we usually have the following predefined roles in a typical cross-functional team.
PM — Product manager
UX/Design — UX/product designer
UI/App — Front-end/app developer
Dev — back-end developer
Ops — Operations engineer
QA — Quality assurance/software tester
BA — Business analyst
DL/IM — Delivery lead/iteration manger
What’s wrong with multi-skills?
For a lot of people, there’s a natural desire to be across two or more areas. That’s why we see more and more DevOps, Full-stack developers and BA/QA hybrid talents in the industry. And we welcome people with multi skill-sets, as they bring in fresh ideas and innovative approaches across domains.
For me, at such an early stage of career, I always wanted to assess what inspires me more and where I really want to be in a few years’ time, without worrying about my current position and skill level.
With a bit of Pokémon inspiration, I came up with a radar assessment framework.
I listed out all the roles I mentioned above and put them in a circle by the amount of skill-set overlap they have to each other (Based on my knowledge, open to suggestions here.).
Then I rate each of them out of 5:
5 being “I can see myself enjoying working in that role in 3–5 years time.”
1 being “I can’t see myself working in that role in 3–5 years time.”
0 being “I have no idea what that role is.”
P.S. This chart is not an assessment of your current skill level or capability, it’s more of a prediction of what inspires you the most in the following 3–5 years. More along the lines of “where role I am heading to?”
Here comes my final radar:
I’m an imagineer.
After the exercise, I found myself landed between UI dev and UX/design, which doesn’t surprise me as I do enjoy building quality user interface that users love to use, as well as understanding the user behaviours and help shape future products.
Setting up Goals
Now with my goals in hand, I started to put in the skills required outside each axis. The output is something that looks like this.
Based on my scores, I now have clear skill development opportunities mapped out in front of me. It really helped me to work out what skills I want to focus on in the next few years in order to achieve my career aspirations.
The other thing you can do with this is to use this graph to think of someone you identify yourself the most with and then research them, learn from them.
Like it then share it
Here I encourage you to give it a try with the link below.
The magic moment is when you finish scoring each role, you get your complete shape and you go “Wow, that thing just represented me!”
I’d love to hear your feedback as well, as I think the framework will evolve over time as the industry moves forwards.
If you do find it useful, feel free to pass it along as well.
