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Scheduled Career Advancement at Planet Argon

We believe that career advancement is essential to developer satisfaction and team morale. In addition to clear role descriptions, we've also designed a structured role advancement process so developers can plan out their growth at Planet Argon. This role advancement process includes a skills and role requirements assessment, a career trajectory planning session, and milestone check-ins and celebrations.

Scheduled Advancement Plan

Our advancement plan is designed to be proactive rather than reactive. It provides a scheduled evaluation process that includes multiple types of assessments.

1. Evaluation of Current Skill Level

  • Self-Evaluation (Form)

    Engineers fill out a self-evaluation form that encourages them to assess their strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and areas for improvement.

  • Peer Evaluation (Form)

    The engineer's peers will also fill out an evaluation form, providing valuable feedback that might not be evident from a self-assessment or manager's perspective.

  • Skill Evaluation

    Depending on the role, a skill evaluation may be conducted to objectively measure the engineer's technical proficiency and how it has progressed since the last assessment. We are currently using CoderByte for these assessments.

  • Manager Evaluation

    An engineer's direct manager will assess their performance based on previously-established goals, how they contribute to the team, their interactions with clients, and other role-specific criteria.

2. Comparison with Role Requirements

After gathering all evaluations, an engineer's manager compares their current skill level with the competencies and skills required for their role to identify any gaps or areas for improvement.

3. Identification of Growth Opportunities

Based on the skill level assessment, responsibilities comparison, and the current and projected needs of the company, the engineer and their manager will determine which skills they need to develop or improve to further embody their current role and/or advance to the next role.

4. Resource Gathering

The engineer's manager will create a list professional development resources the engineer will use to build their skills. These can include online courses, internal mentorship, or projects that would expose the engineer to specific technologies or challenges.

Some examples of our favorite learning resources are:

  1. A Cloud Guru: For AWS certification prep and other DevOps, security, and site reliability courses.
  2. DevPath: For creating custom learning paths in specific languages, frameworks, or general computer science and software development concepts.
  3. Learn Enough: For structured intros into the command line, Git, HTML and CSS, Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript.
  4. roadmap.sh: For planning learning paths in specific technologies or development concepts.

Schedule Timeline for Growth Plan

Timeline Expectations for Those Improvements

Once the goals and resources have been decided upon, the engineer and their manager develop a reasonable timeline for meeting the milestones and advancing to the next role. This timeline will vary greatly between developers and even between role tiers. Regardless, each plan will have regular check-ins and milestone celebrations included in the schedule. The engineer's advancement through the plan should feel like an accomplishment, not a chore!

Milestones/Evaluation Guidelines

Key milestones will be identified and the engineer's progress will be reviewed at these points to ensure they're on track. Because professional development time is sensitive to client requests and project needs, there may be weeks that require a slight change in schedule. However, any extension of the timeline will be done as a last resort and only when we've exhausted other options.