Career Ladders

When I worked in the Online Sales and Operations team at Google, one way they helped give us career direction and let us know what we needed to achieve to be promoted was a career ladder. The career ladder outlines the different levels within a department and what needs to be achieved to be performing well in that role.

We've recently created team ladders for our Software Engineering and Customer Happiness teams. I thought I'd share the Customer Happiness Wonderperson Career Ladder here.

The idea is that to be promoted you need to be exceeding expectations on the requirements in your current level, and be already performing the requirements for the next level up.

Not only does this provide guidance and motivation for the team on what to do to be promoted, but when we set goals each quarter we can look to the career ladder to identify what needs to be achieved for that team members development, and we can aim to find projects within the business that help with this. For example, if a Customer Happiness Wonderperson II is looking to be promoted to a level III, amongst other things we need to find a 'high impact project' for them to lead, or a junior team member for them to mentor and train.

The career ladder has been working really well for us so far.