Career Path Engineering @iAdvize (Part 1)
Preamble
In this article, you will discover the beginning of this project: the initial need, the ideas expressed, the different steps until the application of the Engineering Career Path at iAdvize, in place since January 2022.
This tool allows each member of the Engineering team to have visibility on possible career opportunities. This promotes the development of skills as well as the projection of its profiles.
These different possibilities of evolution on a first draft, will adapt in time to meet the challenges and needs of the company and the Engineering teams.
Introduction
The organization of the Tech team (called Engineering in this article) has evolved along with the growth and structuring of the iAdvize teams: Startup, created in 2010, now has 230 employees, raising it to the rank of a Scale Up.
Growing a team from 20 to more than 50 Techs necessarily requires testing and implementing organizations with more levels of responsibility and more clearly defined roles, while maintaining a technically demanding management team capable of developing the talents present.
Over the years, different organizational models have been tested and adopted:
- CTO > Developers ;
- CTO > Lead dev > Developers
- CTO > Engineering Managers > Software engineers
2020 was the year of awareness, because we realized that the organization in place was satisfactory in terms of results and quality of production, it was however unsatisfactory from a projection and career development for the teams and candidates point of view.
We therefore decided to make this subject a priority in order to understand everyone’s expectations and to find a scheme that could correspond to both employees and management, while maintaining an excellent level of delivery.
How did we proceed?
First of all, it is important not to neglect the stage of defining the Project Owners whose mission will be to manage the whole project, from its start to its deployment.
This project was carried out in conjunction with 2 Engineering Managers and a HR Business Partner specialized in Tech teams, allowing us to have a multidisciplinary group with Tech business expertise, team management and career management.
1 - Conducting an internal diagnosis
At iAdvize, we base our thinking on all of the surveys and KPI’s at our disposal in order to listen and understand the needs.
A) Surveys/KPI’s
We analyzed all the existing internal surveys and feedbacks:
- Genius Survey: Employee engagement survey conducted semi-annually, allowing us to ask questions (among other things) about the “My career @iAdvize” item
- Debrief Survey: A team debrief with the manager and the HR dedicated to these teams in order to gather more feedback on this survey
- Exit meeting survey: A survey conducted with the employee when leaving iAdvize including a “Career” item
- Exit Meeting: a discussion between the employee and his/her HR to gather a maximum of qualitative feedback
B) Individual interviews
One-to-one interviews (1:1) are a valuable tool to verbally support opinions, especially on the possibilities of projection, whether during regular exchanges between employees and managers (weekly follow-up, quarterly interview, annual interview);
Also during exchanges between the employee and the People (HR) team on occasional exchanges, professional interviews every two years.
2 - Gather external benchmarking data
To ensure that we are relevant and competitive, we also took some time to look at what exists outside of iAdvize. This gives us food for thought and helps reinforce the support of the teams, who will be very interested in comparing themselves to their counterparts regarding their evolution.
Here are the actions taken:
- Exchanging with peers who have successfully worked on this type of task (CTO, Tech Managers, HR etc.)
- Reading online articles on the subject (Medium 😉…)
- Listening to Podcasts, watching online videos that nourish this reflection
At the beginning of 2021, the topic was not yet mature for most French Tech companies, we learned a lot from the articles available online on the topic and from our past experience (setting up a specific Tech skills repository for example).
3 - Summarize and define the objectives
The results of this internal and external research allowed us to identify 3 objectives to be achieved:
- Create different levels in this Engineering Career Path so that each engineer can visualize his or her progress
- To have a simple, concise and easy to use format
- Communicate and support individual managers and employees in the use of this tool
4 - Transform the objectives into an action plan
A) Establish a retroplanning and create the adoption
The retroplanning allows you to schedule the project over time, taking into account everyone’s imperatives, while making sure to keep a certain rhythm to keep the contributors committed.
The work prior to setting objectives, as well as the involvement of our CTO, facilitates the adoption of the project.
As an illustration, here is the project retroplanning, as shared with the teams, from the genesis to the contractualization of the job title changes:
B) Involve the engineering management and their teams in the project
The way to involve teams depends on their size, the company culture and finally the management style.
At iAdvize, we are collaborative and we believe that for a project to be adopted, the teams must be involved in the discussions.
We have integrated all the engineering management staff and also called on volunteers within the teams.
We spent several months identifying employees who were interested and responsive to the project.
It is ideal to mix the teams according to their technical field, seniority, experience, level of study, and gender, in order to gather a maximum of diverse ideas and opinions for an optimal representativeness.
Thus, a total of fifteen people were mobilized to work on the project.
The first workshop ensured that all the Engineering managers were on board and that they would be the driving force behind the implementation of the Career Path once it had been defined and validated. This workshop was facilitated using the MoSCoW method with the objective of identifying project expectations, classified under 4 categories:
- Must: What the Career Path must meet
- Should: What it should meet
- Could: What it could meet (bonus)
- Won’t: What should not be included
Image below of the result of the exercise with management:
C) Facilitate and summarize the collaborative workshops
We conducted 6 workshops in total (2 sessions per group — the 15 contributors were divided into 3 groups of 5). The results of these collaborative brainstorming workshops can be found in more detail in the “Career Path Engineering” section.
Some tips for organizing your workshops:
- Prepare well in advance: the objective and the expected outcome, the process and the animation of the workshop
- Take note of the ideas as you go along to avoid a lot of post-workshop summary work: There are several tools at your disposal whether you are remote or on site (image below as an example)
D) Communicate regularly on the progress of the project
This action is sometimes neglected or forgotten, yet it is an essential element for the success of the project.
The benefits:
- Provide an equivalent level of information to all teams, including newcomers
- Create a constant and realistic interest of the teams on the project result
- Value the involvement of volunteer contributors
At iAdvize, we have a weekly team meeting in the Product&Engineering division that allows us to relay the project roadmap and progress in a few minutes.
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Thank you for reading!
- Engineering Part 2 (The result) is already available here: https://medium.com/iadvize-engineering/career-path-engineering-iadvize-part-2-3be14334892b
- Engineering Part 3 (Feedbacks) is also available here: https://medium.com/iadvize-engineering/career-path-engineering-part-3-e9591c113d88
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