Customized Career Progression Models

"Where do you see yourself in two years?" The question hung in the air during our 1-on-1. My best engineer was asking me directly. I had no answer. Because HR's career framework wouldn't be ready for 15 months. She resigned three weeks later. Same salary elsewhere. But they could tell her exactly how to get to principal engineer. That hurt. More than the recruitment cost. More than project delays. Here's what I realised: while I waited for corporate frameworks, my team was making their own decisions about their future. Just not with me. So I stopped waiting for corporate frameworks. Started building something myself. 5 things that actually worked: 1️⃣ Co-Created Job Descriptions With The Team Not HR templates. Real conversations about what the role involves. "What should someone in this position be doing in year two?" "What skills would make them invaluable to any future team?" 2️⃣ Used SFIA As Foundation SFIA has seven skill levels already mapped out. Don't reinvent the wheel. Downloaded their role descriptors. Adapted them to our context. Saved months of internal debates about "what does senior mean anyway?" 3️⃣ Built Skills Matrices Together Mapped everyone's current skills against role requirements. Made progression visible. Everyone could see their next step. More importantly, they could see gaps that mattered. 4️⃣ Connected Individual Objectives To Career Growth Each quarterly objective tied to specific skill development. "Complete this project" became "Lead this project to develop stakeholder management skills." Suddenly performance reviews had context. 5️⃣ The Critical Part I Almost Missed Connect everything to their actual work AND their aspirations. I initially created this comprehensive framework. Beautiful skills matrices. Detailed progression paths spanning three pages. My team looked overwhelmed. One person said: "This feels like homework I'll never finish." They were right. It was too abstract. Too disconnected from Monday's sprint planning or Wednesday's client escalation. The breakthrough: tie every framework element to real scenarios. "This API design discussion? It's building your technical leadership skills." "That stakeholder pushback you handled? Architecture influence experience." Result: Retention rate will improve rapidly. People stopped asking about other opportunities. Started asking about stretch assignments instead. The warning: it feels like massive overhead upfront. And it becomes complete waste if people can't connect it to their daily reality. But waiting 18 months for corporate approval? That's guaranteed talent loss. Don't wait. Start building career clarity for your team this week. What's the first conversation you're going to have? ♻️ Share this with a fellow middle manager building their team ➕ Follow me (Maxime Saporta) for more on team leadership

Career Development/Progress in #Bioinformatics I've been working on a Behavioural and Competency Framework (#BCF) for non-specific Bioinformaticians - a template that can be adapted and built on for different role types and organisations. For now, it's intended as a guide, it's incredibly generalised. It's not perfect and it won't capture every edge case. For example, it is tricky to fit the framework to a solo bioinformatician role, since many behaviours are framed around teams. In those cases, there are probably useful alternatives. And it's also worth noting that this is written with industry in mind. Academia and research follow a different system altogether - often tied to publications, grants, or tenure - which doesn't always translate easily into this kind of framework. However, it should still be a huge improvement on a lacking BCF, the BCF that only considers management in progression and the BCF stolen from the software engineering department. What I hope this does is three things: 1. Help organisations think about retention and progression by giving a structure for career development, #upskilling and #recognition. 2. Give bioinformaticians a way to reflect on where they currently sit, where their strengths lie, and where they may want to grow/upskill - whether that's down the individual contributor (#IC) route and #leadership or towards #management. 3. Help recruiters/hiring managers hire at an appropriate level required for their org/team. Because job titles are still messy in bioinformatics (something I keep repeating, but it hasn't changed yet (and may never change)!), I've avoided mapping to specific titles here for that very reason. Instead, I've gone with levels as numbers, where: Level 1 could be thought of as "Junior"/entry-level Level 3 roughly maps to "Senior" or the beginning of a leadership journey/seniority Level 6 is closer to "Director" or the top end of career progression for a bioinformatician before hitting the c-suite I'd really welcome thoughts on how others would map titles to levels (or feel free to just mentally map those in when reading) - what are the titles/roles you have come across in your bioinformatics adventures, or if you've seen other frameworks that work well. To keep progression as a possibility even at the higher roles, how have you seen this approached? With more granular levels? Adding a I/II/III to a role for ease? This is a starting point (I hope it isn't an end point, we can only be so RESTful 😎- please), and I'd like to iterate on it with input from the community. If it can help even a few organisations provide clearer progression paths - or a few bioinformaticians gain clarity on their own growth - then it's a step worth taking. Quick note: Market values can vary greatly across different regions/worldwide - consider the values as a ballpark figure between levels, UK. Quicker note: Experience in years is also just a guide - and not a true measure - see other posts on XP points.

One of the most common questions I get in interviews is: "What does career progression look like in your company?" Which is why I find career progression maps incredibly effective. A well-defined career map: 1. Helps designers identify what they need to work on 2. Clearly sets expectations on career progression 3. Connects the dots between hard and soft skills 4. Sets the tone for assessing performance 5. Provides clarity and alignment I created this simple product design progression map to help you understand some of the key areas we assess when building design teams. For simplicity, it's broken down into 4 areas: - Ownership - Collaboration - Craft - Research Larger design teams sometimes break this down even further and include specifics like communication, impact, mentoring, design systems, prototyping, and so on. The map covers core career levels from Junior to Lead/Staff without going too granular on IC vs. Management pathways, as these differ greatly from one company to another. Use this map to: - Assess where you are in your journey - Find areas where you may benefit from growing - Help build your organization's design career map If you found the map useful, consider reporting ♻️ Find the link to a full Notion template you can copy for your organization in the comments below 👇 #productdesign #uxdesign #uiux