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Companies and leaders that care about their employees invest heavily in professional development. Professional development not only improves the skills of your overall team, but it’s also foundational to creating a strong culture. In this article, we explain the professional growth plan that we use here at Admios for our software developers.
Developers have a thirst for knowledge, but as managers, we need to ensure our staff is acquiring relevant knowledge for our business and using training time as efficiently as possible. At Admios we provide professional development tools and guidance to every employee from day one. We create a yearly plan for each developer that consists of company goals and personal goals, that is used to evaluate company advancement going forward.
STEP ONE: GROWTH PATH
There are four levels for developers to move through in our organization:
- Assistant Developer
- Developer
- Senior Developer
- Architect
Your team may have different milestones and roles, but there should be some sense of hierarchy and growth path.
STEP TWO: TECHNICAL SKILLS
We make a list of languages, technologies and frameworks that we are interested in and can easily evaluate. These are divided into categories depending on their interest and background: Core Languages, Front End Back End and Mobile frameworks, Databases, Data Layers, Testing, DevOps and Software Development Lifecycle.
These categories are scored from 0 to 4 in the following way:
STEP 3: EVALUATION
We came up with a set of “Development Skills” that establishes clear-cut aptitudes each developer should have at each level. A few examples are:
ONGOING: EVALUATING THE MARKET AND TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE
Each year, we evaluate our languages, technologies and frameworks to stay updated with what is most relevant with the market and our customers. If we see an important up-and-coming framework, we’ll put it as a suggestion for people that want to dive deep and become leaders of that technology in the company.
If you've got some skills gaps on your team, chat with us to see if we can provide the devs you need quickly so you can get your projects out the door.
CONCLUSION
As managers, we can’t expect developers to create a professional growth plan on their own. We need to guide them and provide them with a solid plan that gets evaluated yearly. While the specific steps and evaluation criteria may be different in your company, we hope this example can get you started to create a formal professional development for your employees.
