Hi all,
I’m building a skill-matrix for a quality career-track in my company.
Currently there are one level 2 manual tester (IC), one level 3 automation engineer (IC), and one level 4 lead engineer (Mngt). (Levels go from 1 junior to 7+ VP)
I’m sharing my file here for two reasons:
- To give back to the community, in case it can help someone else later on.
- To ask for your feedbacks, to improve it before I launch it internally.
More infos:
- Company is a SaaS provider with 3 QAs for about 40 dev’ and about 400 people total
- I was trying to focus on skills and to keep the matrix rather “lean”. It must be long enough to be useful, but short enough because few people will actually need it.
- I chose to have manual test from 1 to 4, automation engineer from 1 to 5, and lead/manager from 4 to 7. That’s open to discussion of course.
Thanks a lot in advance!
My skill-matrix for a quality career-track (sorry, couldn’t drop the excel file…) =>
P.S. : If some people prefer to have the excel file, let me know in DMs (or tell me if I can drop it somewhere here).
I think the most useful feedback will be from the people themselves so I’d suggest you share with managers first to refine, but quickly ask for feedback at all levels. This will highlight ambiguities, gaps or overlaps.
I have created such a matrix and managed it’s implementation so this is my advice. Once it’s right though the whole process can work well and can certainly boost morale and productivity across the team.
Gut feel is that there will be more time spent on managing and tracking this that on actually helping people develop.
I’ve worked flat structure for over a decade and tend to see much higher value out of trust, empowerment and support. It might take a month to get someone to level three then a few more for the next level.
So what are your goals here for usage?
To help allocate people to he right tasks, to guide training, to give promotion targets. I would likely do this in a tailor made for the individual approach.
I’m sure others may find this useful and I am not arguing against it, I am flagging its not going to suit everyone and there is a risk it creates more work and problems than it solves. Use with care.
I do intend to work on the matrix with the concerned people. However, I wanted to have something pretty reasonable before showing them. Two reasons for that: They are not so experienced with HR/career topics, so I didn’t want to put them in a stressful position. Also: The grid will be used as a basis for their professional growth here, so I wanted to avoid biais and conflict of interest (be judge and jury).
I definitively don’t want to spend too much time on this. This is a fairly new HR requirement (that each department has one). We’re still a pretty young and growing company. We are in a transition from really flat structure to one with multiple levels of management. But this also comes as a tool to answer some employees’ questions about how to grow and what career paths are there in the company.
The manager already does weekly 1-1 with fact-based feedbacks, and monthly 1-1 with objective-tracking, and quarterly 1-1 with higher level discussion (satisfaction and career). So, in some was, this grid won’t change anything, except making more explicit the long-term overview of things. I feel that trust, empowerment and support are already here 
Officially/Internally, the goals are:
The grid is a strategic tool that helps individuals and organizations visualize and plan career progression. The Career Matrix is part of an HR trajectory dedicated to the development of employees. It aims to:
-
For employees: clarify expectations for each role / Provide visibility on career paths and possible progressions / Develop autonomy and create a sense of equity
-
For managers: Guide HR decisions (promotions, increases, training needs…) / Facilitate performance evaluation / Better manage recruitment with TAs / Identify key skills to develop for teams
-
For employees and managers: know the skills required to move from one level to another.
-
For everyone: have a clear vision by reading the nomenclature of job expectations and skills by level.
So this isn’t about allocating people to he right tasks. This will be a guide from which each individual growth can be planned, nurtured, and evaluated.
I take good note of your point that this might suit some but not others, and that it might add problems too.
Thanks!
With Andrew on this, The two times in my life I have had this large a sheet shoved in front of us I have had large redundancy rafts start floating out within a year. This is going to raise stress more than it’s worth.
I do however like the way it can be used to transparently codify how employees are rated and considered for pay rises and also as a way to help people who want to, to progress or raise their game. However less is more, and having details in there like mentioning specific tools is a big no-no. Because if your company stays on the same tools they will get left behind very soon. Replace these with skill descriptions, like: at L1 , skills around learning to use new tools, at L2 being self-guiding with tools, and L3 being able to select and find new tools, just as an example.
Also boil it down a bit so it’s smaller boxes and more open to interpretation, than a kind of fixed bar below which many people will find themselves and thus start to worry. We all have low times or other life events that impact us, and having a hard target commonly de-motivates anyone who is neurodiverse in your workforce. And lets face it most of your workforce will be ND. I wonder if this is a tool or measure that only people-managers need to know exists. Is that a more subtle way to still keep things fair across all teams by having only team leaders be shown the matrix?
Now you mention it, yep strongly associated with redundancy rafts from past experience and worse I was part of the problem in creating it.
For me I do not like the pay rise aspect, usually there is a total budget and then its a competition on how a manager spreads that across a team and when that raft is on the radar its a minimal budget and weeks are spent trying to decide if someone gets 2 or 3 percent. At one dysfunctional place I was at we even had the leads turn down pay rises saying give it to junior team members, it was so little for them to make a difference but an okay amount for juniors to be valuable. Did more harm than good.
I do like the targeted learning and skill improvement aspect though, individuals who can say without fear what their level actually is and their managers working out a support plan to help them advance. This is rare.
Thanks a lot for your feedbacks.
Some reactions:
- Redundancy rafts: My company’s context make me confident that it won’t happen , at least within the QA departement. But I took good note of your point and will relay it to other managers.
- Specific tools: Oops, my bad. I will make sure to, at least, make it tool agnostic and mention only its purpose.
- Skill descriptions intention: Yes, the whole file is supposed to focus on skills, I can confirm that.
- More open to interpretation: Isn’t that a double-edged sword? Isn’t that opening even more for endless discussions? My goal is to have something useful for the employee and manager. I understand that too precise or technical isn’t useful. But the opposite too, no?
- Only people-managers need to know: Interesting point in general, but it won’t happen here. HR is widely communicating about this to all employees. So no point in keeping it between managers at my company.
- Pay raise competition : Everything you said is spot on (and is fairly true at my company overall). In my case though, keep in mind that there isn’t any competition in the QA department because they are only one person per “track”, and 3 in total.
- “Targeted learning and skill improvement”: Could you elaborate a bit on this? What do you mean?
Again, thank you very much!
In some cultures, talking about pay and about “rank” is very much frowned upon and will depend also on law in the country. For example in the USA, employment law means people can be fired at the drop of the hat, but in the UK it’s much harder. In fact if you let 100 people go in one quarter, you have to go through a process which has the company hit the headlines in London. For Brits pay used to be very much a taboo or politely avoided topic, many don’t know that you are allowed to tell people what you are paid in the workplace. As someone who is not motivated by money, I also found the structuring or pay bands less interesting when we did one of these tables.
What was interesting was when the table of skills and ranks was linked with things like giving people an afternoon of “innovation” time, and when online training courses were pushed in front of us. That was far more useful than a manager just asking someone to work harder. So the table we were given actually identified little practical things like a linked-in learning subscription (other online training portals do exist).
