zenika-career-paths-framework
Zenika Career Paths framework
The Zenika Career Paths framework is meant to help our collaborators customize their sought goals to develop their impact in the industry. (You can access the website here)
Inception & Goals
The first version of the Career Paths framework was created out of necessity: career management has to be implemented in any organization to fairly assess the impact of each collaborator and provide them clear guidelines to grow within the organization.
However, there are a few pitfalls to take into account:
- In a flat organization, career growth cannot be reflected by titles alone
- Individuals rarely appreciate being labeled or put in boxes
- Career growth is seldom vertical in our industry and economy
- Practices evolve at a fast rate (techniques, technologies, organizational models, methodologies…)
- When “promoted”, people are not being asked to “do the same thing in a better way”
- The managerial path is not so Golden anymore
Given these, we aimed for a framework that would:
- Break down and appreciate the value a collaborator can provide in pre-identified meaningful areas
- Identify in which specific areas they would like to grow
- Highlight their particularities as much as possible
The sought outcomes of using our framework were:
- Help collaborators figure out their Hatarakigai / 働きがい / Worth of Working (or Ikigai if work is part of it)
- Help them own and craft their career as they see fit
- Help the organization appreciate and leverage the diversity of profiles with a structured approach
- Help the organization provide adequate growth support to all collaborators accordingly
We also aimed to enforce the following aspects:
- Durability: decouple the career paths from “trendy titles” (e.g. Fullstack Developer, Data Scientist…)
- Flexibility: include all typologies of consultants (e.g. Agile coaches, Architects…) and other staffs (e.g. Accountants, Managing Directors…)
- Accuracy: propose clear ways to develop one’s career(s) in our industry (IT services)
What is not covered by the Career Paths framework
A career may fill a big part of life. But our personnal objectives may change with time. Our strengths, weaknesses, motives, satisfactions may vary as well. The Career Paths framework will not explore the internal motivation that drives our life, nor the (soft) skills required to progress in a particular path.
Motivation aspects are available in the literature through many materials: Moving Motivators (Management 3.0), Process Com, ActionTypes… The internal motivation aspect is an important point because it is a key factor to be “energized” for our daily activities.
Skills are important as well. And the skills required to enhance our capabilities are often described as soft skills, which is a largely misused term. You can go back to the origin of the term in this document. And you may find a list of these “soft” skills here.
When running career coaching session, you should therefore use complementary methods or approaches along with the Career Paths framework.
- Gallup’s approach may help link your skills to a capacity you want to develop
- Process Communication may help you identify if a path will be natural or more challenging for you. It may also provide some hints on how to use some motivation drivers to succeed in your learning.
Concept
Through multiple iterations, we ended up with a framework with 6 paths where one can grow their impact:
- Practices & their related Domains: through concrete techniques and knowledge
- Delivery: through optimizing production outputs
- Leadership: through moving teams towards clear inspiring goals
- Business: through developing meaningful connections and opportunities for work
- Architecture: through leading construction work
- Posture: through positively influencing one’s ecosystem
And since we need to introduce the idea of “growth”, steps or milestones are defined for each path.
This led to the following model:
Of course:
- We need to appreciate where the collaborators are and what they like doing before targeting growth
- One individual is not limited to one path: they can grow on multiple paths at the same time
But we were not completely satisfied with the customization potential yet.
The reason was that: if you had two local experts in React.js, how can you expose their specificities further? For this, we decided to add the concept of Colours to the mix.
A colour is applied to a step to reflect an outstanding particularity.
In the case of our React.js experts, one may focus a lot on Cloud integration while the other one might focus more on Craftsmanship.
The colours make their specificities stand out. Since they are very context-bound, we decided that the colours should be free from constraints.
However, we did create a list to provide some common Colours one can usually find in drawn Career Paths:
By putting together all of the above, here is an example of a Career Profile for a fictive Java Expert:
This should hopefully give you a first idea of what our framework is! Of course, it was written for Zenika collaborators (front-office and back-office staff). It may therefore not fit your specific needs as it is.
Besides, coaching techniques and reflexes are necessary to lead sessions based on the framework. We have seen that it usually requires ~2 hours of training with one of our Career Paths coaches + a shadowed session to be comfortable leading sessions independently. Some career crafting aspects are covered by the coaches and not the framework itself (e.g. motivators, activators, significance…).
If you are interested in our approach to build a tailored framework for your organization or to run career coaching sessions, you may contact us at info@zenika.com.
In the meantime, if you would like to deep dive further in our own framework, you can:
- Start by exploring each path individually:
- Check out some career profiles examples:
- COMING SOON
- Explore additional resources on the IT career paths topic
- How to start deploying the CareerPath in your organization
- Start a follow-up discussion with us at info@zenika.com