Maturing technical ladder eco-system:

Situation

An organization with its focus on wireless telecommunications has technology as a core element of its overall brand. However, over the past few years the technology brand had shed some of its weight. For scaling from its current position to the targeted several-fold size it was imperative that the organization strengthens its technology brand. And aligning technical talent pool to the organizational goals was a critical first step.

Objective

Primary objective of the intervention was to build faith in the technical career path. This was to be done by refining the existing technical career path, integrating it with one of the business processes and educating the aspiring technical leaders.

Actions

We partnered with the corporate HR. Refined the technical competency framework to a simple and understandable form. Conducted focus group discussions with engineers in all the locations either face-to-face or through tele-conference calls. We participated in the processes like promotion review and experienced the how the competency framework is used. We integrated the new framework into the promotion review process. We facilitated teachnical leadership development workshops for the aspiring engineers. This led automatically to career counseling. This helped engineers develop their personal development path.

Results

Slowly but surely the engineers started getting convinced that the organization indeed values senior technical specialists. They also started seeing when contribution is in line with organizational goals and when it is not. This improved the alignment of the technical talent pool.