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)

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

  • You can view the current self-evalutation form here.
  • Note: this is a living document. It will evolve as more people fill it out and provide feedback.

  Peer Evaluation (Form)

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

  • You can view the current peer evalutation form here.
  • Note: this is a living document. It will evolve as more people fill it out and provide feedback.

• Skill Evaluation

  Depending on the role, a skill evaluation may be conducted to objectively measure technical proficiency. We are currently using CoderByte for these assessments. You can learn more about this tool and the assessment format here.

• Manager Evaluation

  Your direct manager will assess your performance based on previously-established goals, how you contribute to the team, your interactions with clients, and other role-specific criteria.

2. Comparison with Role Requirements

After gathering all evaluations, your manager will compare your current skill level with the competencies and skills required for your role to identify any gaps or areas for improvement.

3. Identification of Growth Opportunities

Based on the assessment comparison and the current and projected needs of the company, you and your manager will determine which skills you need to develop or improve to further embody your current role and/or advance to the next role.

4. Resource Gathering

We’ll list appropriate resources like online courses, internal mentorship, or specific projects that can help you build the skills you need. Some examples of our favorite learning resources we currently use 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 your goals and resources have been decided upon, you and your manager will 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. Your advancement through the plan should feel like an accomplishment, not a chore!

Milestones/Evaluation Guidelines

Key milestones will be identified and your progress will be reviewed at these points to ensure you’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.

Compensation Considerations

Moving Up in the Current Band

Your current salary and where it falls within your role’s salary band will be reviewed as you complete milestones and demonstrate growth. Success in your growth plan could lead to upward movement in your current compensation band. You can view the role salary bands here.

By adhering to this scheduled advancement process, we aim to create a clear, fair, and transparent path for career development. Your growth is important to us, and this structured approach ensures that we’re all aligned in understanding what it takes to advance within Planet Argon.