Tracking and measuring your career goals
One of the things I say to the engineers I work with is that the most important thing I can do for them is to ensure they’re working in an environment where they always have the ability to learn, one where they’re given the tools and opportunities to learn and when they do eventually decide to leave (which hopefully won’t be for a long time!), they leave a more knowledgable and better equipped person.
Last year, I wrote a post about building a career progression framework for software engineers, which talked about putting a framework in place that engineers could use to measure where they are in their career and how to set goals to progress.
In that post, one of the points I discussed was that progress against the career development framework is an ongoing conversation that should be happening between the engineer and their manager:
It’s important that managers and engineers in the company are meeting regularly for 1:1’s and that concrete instances of those behaviours are being tracked for each team member. Based on what level of progression they’re going for, any gaps will then feed into the personal development plan. The most important thing is that it should be clear how they’re doing at all times. It’s not something that should only be done once or twice a year, it should be a regular conversation between the manager and the employee.
One way of helping to track and measure progress is having a personal development plan (PDP). This is a great way to explicitly write down your goals and be able to tangibly measure and document progress towards them.
Goals for your PDP can come from a few places; they can be directly linked to the career framework and where you want to get to, they can also be as a consequence of feedback received in a 360 review process (more on that in another post!) or they can just be things you’re interested in learning more about.
For a PDP, the key things to track are:
- The goal. What is it you’re actually looking to achieve. This can link back to the career progression framework itself, such as an engineer who is looking to move up to senior, one of the goals could be about being a mentor to a more junior developer
- How will I achieve this goal? These are the clear steps you’re going to take to achieve the goal
- How will I measure if I’ve successfully achieved my goal? What does success actually look like and how will I know I’ve achieved my goal
- When will it be achieved by? Set yourself a rough timeline for when you think you’re going to be able to do it
- What support is needed to achieve the goal. How can the company help you achieve this goal? Do you need training materials, time, tools, budget etc
- What actions have you taken to achieve the goal? What progress have you made so far?
Your personal development plan is owned by you. It’s meant to be a living, breathing document, not something that’s reviewed twice a year.
It’s up to you to keep it up to date and to make sure it reflects want you want to achieve. It’s something that can be used to measure your progression towards your next step up in the progression framework and your career, so make sure you’re reviewing it and discussing it with your manager regularly.
