Designing a Career Progression Framework

How to build a system that recognises and nurtures talent from scratch

How should internal progression look like? When do we know that someone has outgrown their role and is ready for a new challenge, and when can we see that someone is not quite moving in the expected direction and requires more guidance? What is a level and how does it fit in a growth track? The questions kept piling up.

I love a challenge, don’t get me wrong, but creating a whole career progression framework from scratch has definitely been THE challenge of this quarter.

As we start building out our internal operations at Work With Data, the list of things only grows. One of the most recent priorities has been to lay the foundations for employee growth. Our mission of democratising data implies a radical level of transparency and we believe that this trickles down to all areas of our work, not just the data itself. We want to go through the work that has gone into the final product and the beliefs that underpin our approach to progression as a whole.

On a personal level, I’m excited about the project and love talking about how we made it happen. So. What does growth look like at WWD?

What we believe in

When getting started on the project, we had a few things we wanted to make sure would guide it. We could call them our baseline values in a way.

• We want to have levels, but not internal titles corresponding to them.

Titles, especially internally, can create a lot of tension and disparity. In a small startup, a person can become a senior in a year or two, while in a big tech company, it can take 5 years if not more to reach the same title. Our main goals are to encourage and reward progress as well as to ensure that everyone is constantly growing, not to give titles that can muddle the internal team dynamic.

Of course, we are here to help and suggest what titles everyone can use externally. We are also very much aware that in some areas of the business as well as in the later stages of a company’s journey (especially when key senior hires are being made), titles play a slightly different role. All this to say, we are adaptable and when the time comes, we will always be ready to discuss how we can improve the way we deal with progression.

The one thing we will never compromise on is our culture and values. The progression framework has to reflect the way we believe a company should work for everyone to grow, feel valued, and psychologically safe.

I think it’s quite important to mention as well that the no-title approach is quite ✨chic✨ these days. It’s easy to say that we don’t have titles and move on, but that in and of itself is not enough. We do actually need to substantiate our position and be clear on why we do it this way, hence this whole article.

• While we don’t include internal titles, we do include salary reviews.

We have to make sure that level-appropriate pay changes are included in the process, especially with promotions. Everyone should be paid in line with their level and the industry standard (we use the 50th percentile as our benchmark).

A promotion or a level change doesn’t always include a pay raise, but a process for checking that a person is always within the band expected for their level has to be in place.

• The framework has to be flexible enough so that it grows with us.

We are in an incredible position where we are small and decided to start working on progression very early on. We’ve laid the foundations for something that can actually evolve. Based on feedback, we have to always be able to adjust areas we feel need improvement.

Inspiration, Trial, and Error

To borrow a little from the Postmodernists, there is nothing new or original today. When I say that we started from scratch, what I mean is that this is the first time we’ve tried to create a career progression framework of our own. In the process, I read through about 50 existing ones that other companies put in place, many of which ended up being my inspirations. You’ll find them all linked at the bottom.

Following the now quite established way of measuring the progression of Individual Contributors and People Managers separately, we tested a lot of versions, adding and taking out levels to see what would be too complex, unnecessary at our stage, or even just simply not in line with what we believed in.

The many prototypes inspired by other companies’ work 😅

What did the trial & error process look like?

• The initial versions had too many levels and made the whole thing too complicated. While in large enterprises having many levels creates structure and allows the HR/People Team to confidently place hundreds (or even thousands) of employees in neat boxes so that they can linearly move upwards, in small startups less is more. We need structure and clarity — yes — but whatever we put in place has to be simple, adaptable, and functional. The maintenance and decision-making usually stay with the founders and the occasional ops generalist (hi! it’s me) rather than with a separate team which does not come in until much later, so whatever we decide on has to work.
• The later versions had too many managerial levels. Even though we do want to separate the people manager progression from the individual contributor one, we believe that the number of ‘jumps’ between levels should be smaller in that track to curb anything that could in the distant future create middle management. In general, people management is a really interesting thing in smaller companies (when you build a progression framework), because people who become managers have to, in a way, follow both tracks. This is because they very rarely devote the majority of their time to management, unlike in large companies where this could be most if not all of their job.
• We debated at which level should the people management track diverge from the individual contributor one. While it’s true that the skillset of people managers is very different from that of individual contributors, and they do not have to intersect very much (i.e. an individual contributor can and even should be better at their core job than their manager would be), we still strongly believe that you have to be at a certain level first to then be able to manage people in those roles, including senior ones.
• In some of the versions, we toyed with the idea of having sublevels to make the progression and the jumps feel smaller and add some extra clarity to where within a level someone is. In the end, we decided not to include sublevels and instead make them informal for the time being.

And that was it. The vague idea of what we wanted first gained shape, then went through MANY iterations, and finally became the concrete final product.

Growth Tracks

It’s funny how when looking at the final version, it seems so simple that you don’t even think about everything that went into making it this way.

We ended up with 5 levels. Employees in the 1st one are at the beginning of their journey in a particular role. They are quite junior and focus on learning as much as they can, slowly increasing the scope of their work and the impact they make on the team and the company. They can then progress all the way to level 5 at which they are essentially involved in the long-term strategy of the company and have an impact way beyond their immediate role and team.

A freshly minted data analyst joining WWD would most likely be hired as a data analyst I, get promoted to data analyst II, then III, and so on. If our team grew and they expressed interest in and predisposition for people leadership, they could diverge from this track and instead become a data team lead, and so on.

We focused mainly on individual contributors because at this stage all of us are ones. As a small startup, we all wear many hats and our impact is delivered through boots-on-the-ground work (I actually hate this borrowed from military lingo term, but couldn’t think of a good synonym).

When we zoom out and have a look at the direction in which we think this framework will move, we made the people manager track diverge after level 2. We chose to do it this way (instead of splitting the tracks after level 1) because we think this is the lowest point at which you know enough about the work itself and have a high enough level of skill to build on this and go in a different direction.

As aforementioned, the smaller number of levels on the people manager track is also reflected.

How does it look like skills-vise?

It’s all fun and games to have the levels, but how do we know where we are now and when we are getting closer to a jump?

The next part of our work was to figure out what makes a level. How important is the actual knowledge within a field versus the scope and responsibility one has? How does communication interact with the way one plans and executes their work? How much impact should one have and on what?

We ended up with 5 sections (below), each one describing what would be expected from a person at that level at a point when they are ready to move up. Or, what does a person who mastered their current level look like.

So far, we’ve outlined everything in a general sense as well as for data roles specifically (Data Analyst, Data Engineer, and Data Scientist). That’s simply because we are 90% data people at the moment.

🤓 If anyone is interested in reading through the whole sheet, shoot me a quick message and I’ll send it to you. We want to be as open about our progression as possible.

What are some of the things we want to make sure are covered?

• This cannot be a box-ticking exercise. Doing something once does not indicate that you’ve mastered that skill or behaviour. We should always be looking at consistency and repetition.
• We don’t want scores at this stage. Once again, this is something that could be helpful in a big company, but in a small startup environment, adding up scores and making progress based on reaching a number can quickly get derailed.
• This is not a static, once-a-year exercise. Everything should be proactive from both sides — the employee and the manager. While the framework itself is a tool to help guide growth, we at the same time have to nurture a culture of continuous feedback, openness, and empowerment. When it comes to promotions, we want to avoid the 2 big red flags: the power and initiative being solely in the hands of the manager, and the onus being solely on the employee.

In conclusion…

In the end, we arrived at a framework we believe works best and has the flexibility to grow, adapt, and expand without ever compromising on our core values.

It is part of a larger infrastructure we’re putting in place, one project at a time. The way we design our progression framework works in tandem with how we want promotions to look like and how we want quarterly reflections and less frequent reviews to look like.

We learn as we go and we stay open to internal (and now external) feedback. For me personally, it’s been a huge learning curve and passion project. We always talk about what we think a fair and transparent culture looks like. It’s rare to be able to actually help build one.

Sources & Inspirations

• Alan’s Engineering Path
• Alan’s Engineering Path 2
• Medium’s Engineering Path
• Farewill’s Engineering Progression
• Monzo’s Engineering Progression
• Zavvy’s Competencies Framework
• Learnerbly’s Career Framework 1
• Learnerbly’s Career Framework 2
• Learnerbly’s Career Framework 3
• Learngility’s Career Map
• Charlie HR’s Progression Framework

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For those of you who are either casual data enthusiasts, want to read news from all sides of the political spectrum, or just need reliable data for work or study, you’ll probably find what you need on Work With Data.

On a mission to democratise data and make access to it easier than ever before, WWD combines data from open data sources (from the UN to the World Bank to the British Library) with AI algorithms to fill in the missing pieces and build an accurate picture of the world… in data.

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