Growth & Development Skill

Purpose

Provide engineering managers with comprehensive frameworks for career development, engineering ladders, individual development plans, succession planning, and building mentoring programs.

Primary Bond

Agent: growth-development-agent Relationship: This skill provides career ladder templates, IDP frameworks, and development tools that the agent uses.

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Templates

Engineering Career Ladder

engineering_ladder:
  individual_contributor_track:
    L1_junior_engineer:
      scope: "Task"
      experience: "0-2 years"
      expectations:
        - "Completes well-defined tasks with guidance"
        - "Learning codebase and practices"
        - "Asks good questions"
        - "Responds well to feedback"
      technical_skills:
        - "Fundamentals of primary language/framework"
        - "Basic debugging and testing"
        - "Version control basics"
      behaviors:
        - "Eager to learn"
        - "Communicates blockers"
        - "Follows team practices"

    L2_engineer:
      scope: "Feature"
      experience: "2-4 years"
      expectations:
        - "Owns features end-to-end"
        - "Writes production-quality code"
        - "Participates in code reviews"
        - "Mentors juniors informally"
      technical_skills:
        - "Proficient in primary stack"
        - "Understands system architecture"
        - "Writes comprehensive tests"
      behaviors:
        - "Self-directed"
        - "Proactive communication"
        - "Contributes to team discussions"

    L3_senior_engineer:
      scope: "System"
      experience: "4-7 years"
      expectations:
        - "Designs and delivers complex systems"
        - "Influences technical direction"
        - "Mentors multiple engineers"
        - "Improves team practices"
      technical_skills:
        - "Expert in primary domain"
        - "Cross-functional knowledge"
        - "Performance and scaling"
      behaviors:
        - "Technical leadership"
        - "Drives consensus"
        - "Identifies and mitigates risks"

    L4_staff_engineer:
      scope: "Multi-team"
      experience: "7-10 years"
      expectations:
        - "Leads cross-team technical initiatives"
        - "Sets technical strategy"
        - "Builds organizational capability"
        - "Influences beyond immediate team"
      technical_skills:
        - "Architectural expertise"
        - "Technology evaluation"
        - "Technical debt strategy"
      behaviors:
        - "Organizational influence"
        - "Strategic thinking"
        - "Develops other senior engineers"

    L5_principal_engineer:
      scope: "Organization"
      experience: "10+ years"
      expectations:
        - "Shapes company-wide technical direction"
        - "Solves ambiguous, high-impact problems"
        - "Represents company externally"
        - "Creates lasting organizational impact"
      technical_skills:
        - "Industry-recognized expertise"
        - "Innovation leadership"
        - "Technical vision"
      behaviors:
        - "Executive partnership"
        - "Industry influence"
        - "Develops staff engineers"

  management_track:
    M1_engineering_manager:
      scope: "Team (5-8 engineers)"
      experience: "5+ years engineering + management interest"
      expectations:
        - "Hires, develops, retains engineers"
        - "Delivers team commitments"
        - "Creates healthy team culture"
        - "Runs effective processes"
      people_skills:
        - "1-on-1s and feedback"
        - "Performance management"
        - "Hiring and interviewing"
      technical_involvement:
        - "Technical context, not coding"
        - "Architectural input"
        - "Code review occasionally"

    M2_senior_engineering_manager:
      scope: "Large team (8-12) or 2 teams"
      experience: "2+ years as EM"
      expectations:
        - "Manages managers or large team"
        - "Drives significant initiatives"
        - "Develops other managers"
        - "Partners with product leadership"
      people_skills:
        - "Coaching managers"
        - "Organizational design"
        - "Conflict resolution"

    M3_director:
      scope: "Department (20-50 engineers)"
      experience: "4+ years management"
      expectations:
        - "Sets department strategy"
        - "Manages multiple teams"
        - "Executive partnership"
        - "Org-wide influence"
      leadership_skills:
        - "Strategic planning"
        - "Budget management"
        - "Cross-functional leadership"

Individual Development Plan (IDP)

individual_development_plan:
  metadata:
    employee: "{Name}"
    current_level: "{Level}"
    target_level: "{Level}"
    manager: "{Manager name}"
    created: "{Date}"
    review_date: "{Date}"

  career_vision:
    long_term: "Where do you want to be in 5 years?"
    medium_term: "What's your 2-year goal?"
    short_term: "What's your focus this year?"

  current_as

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