What does your career path look like at your company?

Charles Penn recently asked a great question about career paths. How does it work at your company?

Some of the responses.

Test Engineer 1 β†’ Test Engineer 2 β†’ Senior Test Engineer

Junior QA β†’ Mid β†’ Senior β†’ Team Lead β†’ QA manager

Junior QA β†’ SDET β†’ Senior SDET β†’ Tech Lead β†’ Principle/architect

SDET I β†’ II β†’ III - Senior β†’ Technical Lead or Principal

What does the career path look like at your company or companies you’ve previously worked at? How have they helped? How did they hinder?

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I am in the process of defining this as we haven’t really had the path laid out. I’m currently only looking at roles that are paths for the people we have today. While I have further roles in mind, I’m limiting the scope to get it done and in front of the team sooner.

Tester > Intermediate Tester > Senior Tester > Lead Tester

From a testing perspective, there is one title: Tester. Everything else is a modification of that title that is an indicator of skill and responsibility. There is no Junior role. It’s diminutive and I don’t like it, so I don’t have it.

There are other things I’d like to look at. Beyond the lead tester role and the split at senior tester between lead tester and test lead. Those are future Dave problems though.

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Similar to this, from the Staff Engineer book (https://staffeng.com/)

Notice the split at the senior level - this is where you move to either pure (line) management roles or to staff+ positions. The staff roles are high-level individual contributors.

similar posts:

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It’s like this:
Junior β†’ Professional β†’ Senior β†’ Expert β†’ Senior Expert

And from there Department Manager, Group Manager, and Country Manager.

It needs some additions methinks, it’s too much focused on business-side management and I’d add ranks like Lead, Staff, and Principle, for people going to technical management and maybe architect roles too.

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In our company it is kind of similar to the others, but we also updating our department and it’s different ways of career paths, it’s not like only testers, but also agile coaching/consulting or software developer in test. I find it really good that way and we are also involved into career path changes and can sometimes activley be part of the change.

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The career path where I work:
Quality Engineer 1 β†’ Quality Engineer 2 β€”> Senior Quality Engineer β†’ Team Lead β†’ Quality Manager
If you do not want to be a team lead or manager, then we have the Principal Quality Engineer(Subject Matter Expert)

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Career path where I work:

QA Analyst β†’ Senior QA β†’ Program Manager

Used to be a bit different when I started:

QA Analyst β†’ Senior QA β†’ Lead QA

The team is small so I’m guessing they didn’t need a Lead QA and Senior.

I don’t think there’s a path for someone who wants to focus on the technical side like becoming Automation QA in the current team. I do some automation within the role

Flat hierarchy: Quality Engineer β†’ CIO

I do not know it for sure. 2 years ago a new career model was developed but the maintaining person left the company before it was officially finished. I saw multiple problem with it and liked the previous one more.

I guess we still run the beta.
I was looking for it and could not find the information in the intranet. lol

Its basically 3 Levels as tester or developer and I’m at least at 2. There are no fixed wages attached to the levels. I was hired with a wage of most level 2 coworkers but classified as level 1 …

To me it is bullshit as it is mostly an arbitrary separation. Also because it has nearly no consequences.
Even the titles are totally made up. I’m currently β€˜Test Specialist’ …

My company runs a boot camp for a specific role as part of your new hire, unless you’re a seasoned veteran in the field and can prove it through the interview/work experience.

Regardless of the role everyone must attend Mortgage boot camp. It’s a week getting a high level of mortgages and how our company works with them. Then you go to your boot camp…

Devs/Quality Engineers go through a very similar bootcamp for 10 weeks and split at the 7 week mark. Where they will work on their specific role requirements. Before being assigned to a team. UI Devs/DevOps/QA/BA/Scrum/Database etc… all have their own bootcamp

BootCamp β†’ Associate (on the job training for 9months) β†’ Tier 1 β†’ Tier 2 β†’ Tier 3 β†’ senior

Usually at the Tier 2 mark. You can opt to go into Architecture and start getting trained or keep on your current track.

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