The Develeap Career Roadmap

Introduction

Three years ago, we started a certification acceleration program at Develeap, and we rewarded employees for achieving significant technology certifications.
Our main goal was to encourage employees to expand their knowledge and by gaining certifications, we believed they could achieve this goal. Of course, certifications are not the only way to gain and expand knowledge, but we understand that firstly, the certifications we deem to be the most important do provide architectural & usable knowledge. And secondly, this is something our customers can measure.

After some time running this certification acceleration program, we faced the reality and asked ourselves a single crucial question, which later became a turning point for our career development at develeap: What can push us to expand our abilities, every single day of our career?

Which achievements and challenges will help us, as professionals, achieve top form? How can we measure it? How should it be managed and how should we reward our employees for achieving their desired goals?

At this point, we decided to create the Develeap Career Roadmap (DCR).

Goals & principles

What were the main goals and principles behind the creation of the DCR program?

1. Continuously expanding our abilities & skills
2. Always being at the forefront of industry knowledge
3. Continuous learning
4. Continuously increasing our market value
5. Long-term but dynamic plan
6. Increasing our motivation
7. Considering different types of employees; supporting everyone
8. Releasing ‘locked value’ — at the employee level, the team level, the group level, the company level, and even at the community level

How it works

The basics

• Achievements backlog — every employee has an achievements backlog which will be created by the employee himself & his team leader. The achievements can be chosen from the general achievements bucket and new ideas for achievements are more than welcome.
• Points — each achievement has its own ‘price’ (number of points it is worth). The achievements bucket looks pretty much like a pricing list.
• Points to level up — for each level you need a different amount of points. When you reach the desired amount of points — you are eligible to level up!
• Celebration Points — every quarter, we have a “Celebration point”. At that point, we are celebrating all the leveled-up consultants and on that day the winners’ backlog will be “reset” and will get filled together with the team leader with new achievements to achieve in order to get to the next level.
• Level up, get rewarded — when an employee levels up, we want to celebrate with him — not only with the Celebration Point itself but also with a reward. At develeap, the reward is a salary raise.

What does it look like in real life?

Practically, the team leader schedules a DCR meeting at the end of every quarter together with the appraisal meetings. The team leader & the employee talk about what the employee has achieved & plan forward for future achievements. Before the DCR meeting, the team leader should go over the DCR & think forward about the employee’s future, and prepare for the meeting.

When a team leader creates a DCR plan with his teammates, it should begin with firstly think about the future, and breaking it into 3 parts:

1. Long-term — think about where you see yourself in a matter of years forward. Technically and professionally (5–10 years).
2. Mid-term — think about where you’ll be in the coming 1–2 years. How do you see yourself then?
3. Short-term — what can you do to achieve your goals in the coming 3 months? break it into tasks. This is actually the DCR achievement backlog.

Eventually, every team member will have a DCR form, including all his achievements backlog inside. He can understand from the form how many points he needs in order to level up, and what achievements he needs to achieve in order to do so.

Achievement bucket design

With the understanding that we can set wider goals to reach greater success, we started creating an achievements bucket that our team leaders can set together with their teammates for their DCR plans.
The achievements bucket was designed with the thought that these are the areas which we want to improve every single day:

• Produce & share content
• Code quality
• Helping each other
• Knowledge sharing
• Continuous learning & technical learning
• Leading
• Innovation
• Contribution

Each area represents topics and challenges we are facing every day. Let’s talk about them.

Share content & knowledge

We believe that creating content, whether it’s articles, blog posts, or lectures — all of them are getting out of us some skills we are not conducting on daily basis. It requires something else from ourselves and it allows us to share our precious knowledge with others.
When we write our knowledge down into an article or a blog post it requires us to sort the material inside our brains and eventually put it down into a paper in a readable and interesting way for others.
Each one of us faces different challenges from different technologies every day and our responsibility as professionals and actually also as a professional company is to share our knowledge with others, inside the organization and outside.

We do believe that it is not only about responsibility, but it is also about professionalism, and anybody who wants to put himself on the edge of his skills and capabilities, even if he’s technically brilliant, needs to practice creating content.

Lecturing is hard. Talking in front of people is hard. Writing is also hard. Compiling your thoughts into an article is hard. But we must take ourselves out of our comfort zones every day. This is how we improve.

Continuous learning & technical learning

Continuous learning is our attitude. We are providing professional services to our customers and our responsibility is to take our customers forward, to the next level. Therefore we must make sure to improve our technical skills and expand our knowledge continuously. Always be on the edge.
Therefore, we have many certifications & courses inside our DCR achievements bucket. Employees can choose what they want to learn and if they want a technical course or certification that we didn’t put in the bucket — they’re welcome to suggest adding it.

Code quality & Help each other

Something we always want to ensure is our code quality. Therefore, we are performing code reviews continuously for any code we are delivering, whether it’s internally in develeap or together with the customer.
But we decided to add code reviews as a DCR achievement because we want to encourage people to do as many code reviews as possible. Using code reviews, we improve our code quality and help each other do so.
In our DCR achievements bucket, we have a ‘Peer code reviewer’ achievement and a ‘Peer code reviewee’ achievement. You are gaining points for performing a code review for someone else in the company and you’re also gaining points for getting your code reviewed by someone else.

Leading

I would say that measuring leadership & management skills in our DCR program is one of the hardest parts. Although you can measure management, breaking leadership into small ‘achievement’ pieces is very hard. However, we do have some achievements in our DCR bucket that are related to leadership and management: Guild master/expert & architecture process leading.
This part is still under development on our side and I hope we’ll be able to share with you more thoughts & conclusions in the future about how we measure and encourage leadership in our DCR bucket.

Innovation

We believe that innovation is an integral part of our professional path. Every day we need to innovate and create solutions for our customers, and we also innovate internally in develeap. With innovative ideas, we push ourselves forward, and automatically it pushes our company forward together.

However, innovation is something that is very hard to measure. We do have an ‘innovative idea’ achievement in our achievements bucket but it is flexible and the points for this achievement can be changed with the common sense of the management decision, depending on the value the innovation gives.

Contribution

We understand that code contribution, internally or externally adds a lot to our knowledge. It is also related to knowledge sharing.

Contributing to an open-source project is an achievement. It definitely adds to the knowledge of our employees.

More principles

There are some important principles we collected along the way with the DCR that we see their importance to share with you:

1. Extra points are not thrown away — If you have reached more points than needed in order to level up (i.e you need 1000 to level up and you have 1100) the points are saved for the next level! Points are not wasted. We want employees to reach as many points as they can. No limits.
2. Focus time — DCR is created for a new employee at least 3 months since he joined develeap because we want to focus our efforts on success beginning at develeap. It also gives us more time to know and understand each other.
3. The DCR plan belongs to the employee — we don’t want to push the employee to do the DCR if he’s not committed to it or because he can’t put in the effort & the time at the moment. The DCR belongs to the employee and he will decide on which rhythm he’ll achieve his achievements. The employee is responsible for his achievements on his DCR.

Appendix — services company add-ons

Billable hours — when applying DCR in a services company, it is very important to align the DCR with billable hours. You don’t want to have a situation where employees that aren’t working with customers at the moment will overtake those who do work with customers because they have more free time to reach achievements. It’s just not right.
Therefore, we set a ‘must’ achievement — ‘billable hours’ for every employee, with a consistent amount of billable hours needed.
However, unlike other achievements, billable hours can’t cross the maximum count — if you set the Billable hours to 500 and you got 510, it’s still 500. Also, the extra hours aren’t saved for the next level.

The effect

Every quarter we have different employees who reach achieve their achievements and level up. We celebrate together with them at our all-hands meeting with all the company. Last month (October 2022) we had the highest leveled-up amount of employees at a time — 11!
It is super exciting creating a system that encourages employees to push their careers forward using a wide range of possibilities and abilities they can improve, and it is even more exciting watching people achieving their career goals, improving every day, and getting rewarded.

The DCR system is a tool, which helps us set our goals clearly. But — the responsibility to reach our goals and achieve our achievements, is as always, on our hands.

Although it works well at the moment, we will improve the DCR system and changes will come along the way. We will keep you updated!