Self Development - Skills, Competencies and Goals

In engineering at intelliHR we strongly support setting and pursuing self development goals, and provide some frameworks to help engineers create development plans for themselves, or with help from their supervisor.

Process

The following process is recommended to create a self-development plan:

1. In discussion with your supervisor, determine what your longer-term development milestone is (for example, SEI Development Plan, SEII - Senior Development Plan)
2. Create a parent goal on your profile within the internal tenant (My Profile > Goals > New Goal). There are some templates for various circumstances that may be useful.
3. Create a copy of the competency matrix and assess yourself in accordance with your role title (more info below)
4. Book a session with your supervisor to review your self-assessment
5. In conjunction with your supervisor, identify an approach for training activities
   • You might isolate a particular category (for example, Security) to focus on
   • You might decide to take a horizontal approach and target smaller competencies from many areas
   • You might wish to take on a new set of skills and competencies completely outside of the matrix, this is also encouraged
   • You (and your supervisor) should attempt to find real tasks in the business that will expose you to the skills (for example, support tickets, borrowing tickets from other teams, shadowing other staff members)
6. Create more goals in your profile, with the development plan as parent, that correspond to the training activities above. There are a number of content resources available, but real work is always favoured
7. During your allocated training time each sprint, being progressing through your goals!

You should review your goals and progress regularly with your supervisor.

Identifying longer-term development goals

If you don’t have a confident idea of your experience and skills level, the competency matrix has ’thresholds’ detailed as a guide.

Example

• If you are an SEII, and after self-assessing and review you are under the listed ’threshold’ for that role, it is recommended that you target SEII competencies to increase. Your development goal is effectively to solidify your existing competencies
• After another assessment in the future, you might be above that threshold. That means it’s time to target Senior competencies as part of your development plan. Your new development goal is to progress to Senior competency levels, which will end in a promotion

Competency Matrix

intelliHR engineering maintains a competency matrix that represents common roles in the department, and sets out expectations of competencies and proficiencies that are expected from those roles.

The matrix can be found here. Note: Make a copy, do not edit the original.

Introduction session

Feedback on the competency matrix is also welcome, as adjustments are made over time.