How to Build a Software Engineer Career Ladder

Are you an engineering manager and wondering “How to build a career progression framework for my tech team?” Then you're in the right place! This is the third part of a big engineer career progression topic, in which you will find a step-by-step guide on how to create an engineer career ladder.

We’ll also give you a tip on how to hack the professional development of your tech team with the help of Ace AI and become a real mentor for your engineers.

What is career ladder?

An engineering career ladder (or engineer career progression) is not just a list of developer positions and responsibilities. This is a systematized career growth roadmap, which inсludes skills, career goals, salary expectations and a professional development plan (PDP).

To help employees develop professionally and skip level, you need to systematize their career paths. To do this, it is important to create a career progression framework for your company. This step-by-step guide will help you do this effectively and meet the goals of the company.

Read: What is a Software Engineer Career Progression

Toolkit

Before we move to the part on how to create a career ladder in your company, you need to get a basic toolkit. This is a list of tools (with useful links and templates) that will help manage the career growth of engineers and effectively form a career progression framework for them.

Tool #1: Skill matrix

Skill matrices include a set of skills, required for a certain role. These skills are mapped to levels on a career path, so a manager can understand how to identify the grade of each employee and what skills are required to help engineers skip level.

Companies can create their own skill matrices or simply use skill matrix template and adapt them to the needs of their team.

Useful link: Skill matrix template for 50+ tech roles.

Tool #2: Career path template

A career path is a roadmap that contains grades and skills and helps developers understand what needs to be done to reach a new career level: both in the manager track and an IC track.

Typically, grades represent the path from junior to senior. But as a company grows, the engineer career path can become more complex. To learn more about grades systems, read the previous article in this thread - What Is a Software Engineer Career Progression.

Useful link: Career path template for 50+ tech roles.

Tool #3: 1-on-1 meetings

Personal meetings help to discuss career goals, set OKRs, and build a professional development plan with employees. Also during these meetings, a manager can monitor the employee’s progress and make decisions on grade raise and pay raise.

Useful link: 1-on-1 meeting templates.

Tool #4: PDP

PDP is a professional development plan that helps a manager approach the engineer career ladder organization systematically and meet both engineer’s career goals and the goals of a company.

Useful link: Why Tech Companies Need Professional Development Plan For Software Engineers?

Steps to build career ladder

So, now you have the set of tools you will need to create a career ladder framework for your tech team. Let's move on to the steps of its creation and find out how you can hack the process with the help of AI.

4 steps to build engineer career ladder:

1. Create a list of skills
2. Identify career path levels
3. Build PDP
4. Monitor progress

Now, let’s dive into details and consider each step mentioned above.

Step 1: Create a list of skills

At this stage, a list of skills is formed that are necessary for a particular role. The manager can create their own list, or use ready-made skill matrix templates and customize them to the needs of their team.

Step 2: Identify career path levels (grades)

At this stage, a manager assesses an employee’s current level of skills, finds potential skill gaps, and identifies their career path level (or a grade). To do this, you should hold a skills review for the whole team and then analyze the review report.

To identify career path levels easily and fast, we recommend using AI tools that can do it for you.

Ace AI automatically identifies carer path levels of the whole team when you connect Git data. See how it works in practice:

Step 3: Create PDP

After a manager identified a career path level, it’s time to build a professional development plan (or PDP). It will help team members to reach their career goals.

Good PDP should include a combination of educational activities and working tasks on developing focus skills in order to successfully implement continuous learning in the workflow of a tech team and meet career goals faster.

To save time on the search for personalized learning activities for each developer, you can use Ace AI which gives personalized recommendations on mentors and learning activities such as courses, books, etc. based on their skill gaps. See how Ace AI recommendations work in practice:

Step 4: Monitor progress

In order to make the process of professional development effective and implement continuous learning in your tech team’s workflow, an engineering manager should hold regular 1-on-1 meetings with team members to track the progress and adjust their PDPs if necessary, as well as provide feedback on their skill development.

To help you with that, Ace AI writes automatic feedback for specific skills for you to save time:

Also, Ace AI builds automatic agenda for your 1-on-1 meeting to discuss progress based on developer updates from Git and completed tasks.

Key ideas

• Creating an engineering career ladder is not just a list of positions and responsibilities, but a systematized career growth roadmap that includes skills, career goals, and a professional development plan.
• The four steps to build an engineer career ladder include creating a list of skills, identifying career path levels, creating a PDP, and monitoring progress of professional development.
• Using AI tools like Ace AI can help managers automate the process of building a career ladder for engineering team, as well as help them promote.