Building an SRE Career Progression Framework

This resource first appeared in issue #117 on 09 Apr 2022 and has tags Technical Leadership: Systems: Other, Managing A Team: Career Ladders

Building an SRE Career Progression Framework - Ethan Motion

Whether it’s for research software, systems, data management, or data science, a lot of groups are trying to figure out formal or informal career progression pathways for individual contributors. As a manager, you can work with individuals in their one-on-ones to find out where they are interested in and ready to grow, and give them opportunities at that intersection. But how do you start thinking about career progression at the whole-team or multi-team level?

Motion describes a process of bringing together a piece of an organization to hash out a framework of levels on which to hang development pathways. Most importantly, he suggests defining the levels in broad behavioural terms:

Level 1: seeks to understand, attends, shadows, recognizes
Level 3: builds, designs, fosters, implements, applies expertise
Level 5: pioneers, promotes, researchers, informs leadership