How to Help Software Engineers Evolve? RockContent Tech Talent Management Strategy

RockContent creates innovative marketing products and services, designed to build content experiences at scale. Founded in Brazil, RockContent is now a global leader in content marketing, with offices in four countries and six locations worldwide, 2,000 customers, and about 500 employees.

Paulo Gontijo, Director of Engineering at RockContent, will tell why developing the skills of the product and engineering teams inside the company are crucial parts of RockContent talent management strategy.

Brazilian talent market

The competition in the tech talent market is growing. And many tech companies are experiencing serious difficulties in finding the right people for their teams and retaining top tech talent.

As a leader in the market, we want to stay competitive. That’s why we’re investing in training, feedback, and tools that help “Rockers” grow. This is one of our major goals.

Tech companies in Brazil and worldwide start prioritizing people growth. And in RockContent, we work hard to retain and engage our Engineers, PDs, PMs and Agilists. So, everything we can do to help them grow and develop their skills is good for them and for RockContent as well.

Goal: help “Rockers” evolve

To manage tech talent and develop the skills of the team we needed a tool that will help us build clear career paths to evolve.

That’s where Ace AI came in handy. It allowed us to create a transparent framework for helping our team to evolve. With skills matrices, skill reviews, career path templates it helped the team evolve in their careers by demonstrating which efforts should be prioritized.

Implementation of Ace

We decided to start with the Product and the Engineering teams and switch them to Ace AI. And the first thing we needed to do is present the service to team members.

We have kickoff meetings every month with the whole Product and Engineering team: PMs, PDs, Devs, SREs, Agile Coaches, and during one of these meetings, we introduced Ace AI.

We received positive feedback only and met no resistance. So we started to use the service right away.

Building career paths

For RockContent, the initial goal of creating skill matrices for different roles was to help the team develop technical skills and build tech career paths.

Ace AI has successfully covered our needs and helped us to meet this goal. The process of building a career ladder in Ace AI is fully automated and is held in 4 simple steps:

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

Let’s dive into details and see how you can hack this process with the help of Ace AI.

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.

AI hack: To save time on creating skills matrices, use Ace AI skills matrix templates for 50+ tech roles. These skills matrices, or skill graphs, contain the full list of skills for different engineering roles with descriptions and level requirements. Skills graphs are updated in real-time, so you always have a list of relevant skills and recommendations on what skills to develop.

Step 2: Set career path grades (levels)

Next, a career path is formed. It contains job levels (or job grades) and their description - what skills are required to take a certain position or skip to the next level.

The career path may look different depending on the size and the needs of the team. It can have one track or two tracks (manager and IC).

AI hack: To automate the process of identifying career levels for the whole team, you can connect Git and Ace AI will automatically show the career path levels of each developer and their skill gaps based on written code.

See how Ace AI works in practice:

Step 3: Build PDP

Once you have determined the current level of skills of the team members, the manager builds a professional development plan that includes learning activities and work tasks for the development of focus skills.

AI hack: Ace AI allows to save time on creating individual development plans for each engineer. Based on the skill gaps, Ace AI gives personalized recommendations on mentors, courses, books, and other learning materials and offers to add tasks to a development plan:

Step 4: Monitor progress

To ensure that developers are making progress toward their goals, it's important to track their progress regularly.

Implementing the practice of regular 1 on 1 meetings on professional development with software engineers and feedback system helps us to stay up-to-date on their progress, identify any challenges they may be facing, and update development plans if necessary.

AI hack: The easiest way to monitor the progress of skills development of the whole team is to use automatic agenda generated by Ace AI for your 1-on-1s based on developers’ activity in Git:

You can also track the process of professional skills development with automatic feedback for certain skills:

Benefits of using Ace

• Ace AI helped us build a transparent career progression to develop technical skills and grow employees professionally.
• The service covers the needs of RockContent’s Product and Engineering teams as it offers an automated assessment and personalized recommendations on the development of technical skills.
• Ace AI skills and career templates are integrated with the service and allow customization depending on the size and the needs of the team.