Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
54 lines (44 loc) · 4.57 KB

career-planning.md

File metadata and controls

54 lines (44 loc) · 4.57 KB
Raw

Career Planning

When performing the competency assessment, you will naturally identify some opportunities and get feedback during the review from your manager on your performance review. But how to make sure you progress until next time and improve on those? That's where personal goals step in. In order to prevent vague and unactionable goals, we use SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for 5 attributes that are desirable when setting the goal. You can read more about them in for example in the Atlassian article.

If you are not able to fulfill some of these attributes 100%, don't worry. It is just a guideline to help you design your goals, but you don't have to stick to it to the letter. For example, if the goal is not measurable, make it at least as measurable as it can be, but don't overengineer it just for the sake of it. It should help you, not get in your way.

Note that the period does not have to align with performance review cadence. You can have multiple goals in 6 months as well as 1 goal spanning a year.

Example

Let's say the goal is I want to become better at solving issues at production. We will showcase SMART attributes on this example.

  • Specific - What should you aim to accomplish specifically?
    • Instead of: I should get better at solving issues at production.
    • Try: I should gain skills necessary to tackle 80% of the issues on production on my own without required extensive help.
  • Measurable - How can you know you progressed?
    • Instead of: I am better at solving issues at production.
    • Try: I am solving 25% issues of our team and need extensive help only in 5% of them.
  • Achievable - Can this goal actually be achieved? Try answering following questions:
    • Why is this a good goal for me? I am already solving some issues and based on experience of others, this is a reasonable target.
    • What could get in way? Others won't let me investigate the issues.
    • What resources would help? Trainings on all observability tools like New Relic and somebody who will help you with tricky issues.
  • Relevant - How does it relate to your team, company strategy and our business goals?
    • Instead of: I think it should help.
    • Try: We have low bus factor when it comes to solving production issues. Also it is a great way to get debugging skills, which are necessary during quality software development.
  • Timebound - When do you plan to achieve that?
    • Instead of: Sometime in the future.
    • Try: By the next performance review.

Inspiration

The purpose of the goal is to help you improve. Therefore, avoid setting the company or process-related goals. There are several ways how to identify what could be your next goal:

  • Not yet mastered skills from the competency sheet.
  • Filling in a personal development plan or following a career guide, either company-wide one or some public.
  • Talking to people around you (not just your manager).
  • Your own imagination or ambitions, sky is the limit here.
  • One of the following examples:
    • Improving hard skills:
      • Explore a new technology and provide a knowledge sharing session, e.g. based on thoughtworks radar.
      • Participate at a conference or meetup, summarize and share the outcomes.
      • Get better at troubleshooting production issues.
      • Open-source participation.
    • Improving soft skills:
      • Priorities and time management.
      • Communication, giving feedback.
      • Leadership associate program.
      • Get better at gathering and sharing the knowledge.
      • Mentor others.
    • Learn some domain, being it business or technical one (e.g. learning how payments work or advanced concepts of functional programming).
    • Be responsible for delivery of some epic end-to-end (e.g. deliver some feature from solutioning to production, including the monitoring phase).
    • Sharing knowledge, contributing to public awareness (e.g. internal meetings, blogposts, meetups, panel talks, podcasts).

Please note that you don't have to devote extra time to your goals, we are not asking you to work over the weekend on them. Most of the progress should be on your job. If you have some mentoring sessions supporting you or resources you would like to go through, make time explicitly in sprint if that works for you. Last but not least, avoid overwhelming yourslef. If you are studying at university or dealing with some personal situation, you might want to relax these goals to match your time possibilities.