Without a clear map, employees get lost. And when they get lost, they might as well leave. A clear career progression framework helps employees understand where they are in their careers and what advancement opportunities for professional development await them within the company to build a successful career.
We carefully curated career progression framework examples to inspire your internal efforts. You will find 12 great career framework examples and the reasons why are a source of inspiration.
Singular Design is a specialized software development company based in Miami, Florida. They use an intricate leveling system for their employees’ roles. They divide different roles into five levels and 15 sublevels:
Singular Design kicked off the partnership with Deel Engage by assessing all employees and assigning them to a particular sublevel on their intricate leveling matrix.
Once they identified the level of each employee, it was time to create detailed competency-based role descriptions to identify the skills and attributes for each level. Competency-based descriptions help set clear expectations in advance.
To speed up the process, they used Deel’s Engage’s AI assistant to create all job descriptions. The best part is that they could generate all descriptions in Spanish, their corporate language.
Singular Design connected all the dots—from feedback to competency models, career development plans, and guided reminders—without the frustration of manually updating spreadsheets.
Streamline role clarity and boost team motivation using competency-based career progression frameworks. Take a look at how Deel Engage helps teams realize their potential.
Buffer prides itself on its high employee retention. Hailley Griffis, Head of Communications and Content at Buffer, has been with the company for over eight years. She says one key reason for this was that she could find development opportunities that kept her challenged and interested in the work every day.
I am not doing the same job I was hired to do eight years ago, which is exactly how I would want it. I’ve learned so much from taking on new projects and trying to attain new results over the years.
Head of Communications and Content, Buffer
Buffer has a career progression framework that caters to growth opportunities beyond the traditional management track. Individual contributors (makers) and managers have different career paths at Buffer.
Any maker will have different levels in their career path. For instance, a particular engineering role can have the following levels:
Likewise, managers have different levels in their career path leading up to the director level:
Jumping from one level to the next implies a significant and distinct improvement in terms of area knowledge, role complexity, and overall scope, similar to promotions in most companies. Additionally, these moves are subject to a calibration process.
But Buffer’s framework is not restricted to a (dual) career ladder. They also incorporate a horizontal framework, with four steps nested within each level.
Steps serve as smaller milestones of growth in terms of ownership and initiative.
Head of Communications and Content, Buffer
For example, the four steps for level three are:
Each area director can interpret and build upon the four-step framework to create area-specific examples and principles.
A step change can happen anytime, and an employee can jump multiple steps at once. The change occurs at the discretion of each area director. Additionally, a step change does not require approval or discussions outside of the specific area (department).
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Spotify strives to ensure that as employees grow their careers, they have a more significant impact on the company.
The company’s career framework is known as The Steps Framework. It has three main elements:
The main steps for any role are:
There are different expectations for each step. For example, these are the expectations from the squad and chapter step:
Employee remuneration depends on their current step. Technically, steps are measured by professional growth. The manager and team members regularly discuss the steps in their meetings. As employees cross milestones, their impact on the company grows, and they also grow by moving to the next step.
Dropbox is a modern file-hosting service platform that securely stores files. It enables users to collaborate, share, and sync files from any device with friends, family, and coworkers.
The Dropbox framework is based on impact, which for Dropbox means serving customers better to help Dropbox succeed.
There are four pillars to the core responsibilities:
Craft expectations refer to discipline-specific technical capabilities employees need to master.
The career framework helps managers set expectations and hold teams accountable for their work, thus linking it to performance management. Additionally, it showcases how engineers can achieve a more significant impact in their roles and grow their careers.
Interestingly, Dropbox’s career framework doesn’t provide guidance on how workers can move to the next level. Each level describes the end state of the qualities one needs to have.
Engineers have transparent conversations with their managers about goals and gaps to understand how to move to the next level.
Most concert lovers are familiar with Songkick. However, there is a reason why the company is labeled as a good place for people to kick-start their careers.
When defining their career growth framework, Songkick divided the high-impact roles into two sections:
They also defined career paths related to individual contributors and people management roles.
They describe all levels and responsibilities in the context of seven skills that cut across all roles:
Whether an employee should move from their current role to a new role is a discussion between the person and their manager. However, they must master a good percentage of the responsibilities between three and six months to be deemed ready to move to the next step.
Songkick advises their workers and managers to use this document as part of routines such as 1:1s, OKR planning, and review cycles, framing it as a source of truth for setting goals, direction, focus, and growth.
Wise revamped their career paths after noticing that the existing framework lacked details on in-depth role specification.
Currently, Wise’s product career path is divided into seven different career levels:
Each job title comprehensively describes the skills, responsibilities, and behavioral indicators for success.
The different levels give employees a clear view of level-specific expectations and how to progress to the next level.
Wise also mentions the salary of each level in advance for complete transparency.
Wise’s career map complements other HR processes such as coaching conversations and annual 360 feedback reviews, at the end of which employees and their managers refine their individual development plans. These plans help employees define the steps toward increased impact in the organization, enabling them to progress in their roles.
Wise’s engineering career track includes dual paths for individual contributors and engineering team leads.
For individual contributor roles, they define six levels:
For engineering team leads, they define four levels:
These levels are cumulative, so engineers must perform well in all expectations up to their current level. As a result, to fully understand the expectations from an IC4, one needs to consult the expectations from the three previous levels.
The dual path approach showcases how individual contributors can grow in their technical roles and become technical subject matter experts or take the leadership route and follow engineering lead positions.
Engineering team leads oversee their teams' career growth, well-being, and performance and work with the rest of the product organization, contributing to the company’s strategy and roadmaps. They execute and create these strategies.
There are four pillars for each level, IC and EL:
Rent the Runway (RTR) is a popular clothing rental subscription service that allows customers to rent designer apparel and accessories. When the company first launched its engineering ladder, there was too much room for interpretation, creating anxiety and confusion throughout the organization.
“Creating an engineering ladder is a daunting task. If you do a half-hearted job, you’re likely to cause more problems than you solve,” stressed Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway.
They use Excel to host their framework. Role expectations cover four categories:
The first two categories are the primary drivers of lower-level promotions, with RTR defining them as “adder attributes.” As a worker advances on the ladder, the importance shifts to the last two attributes—” multiplier attributes.”
RTN also highlights the “maturity level ups” within the framework, referring to level jumps that bring significant changes in expectations and duties. For example:
Crowdfunding company Kickstarter’s framework is a ladder with different steps. Kickstarter engineering and data roles have three career paths:
The distinction in each role is based on skill sets and techniques in literature and research.
There are ranks or categories within each role an employee can rise to. The Kickstarter framework is presented in a straightforward document with clearly defined roles for each job family.
Intercom is a messaging platform with over 630 employees.
To formulate descriptions for each role level, Intercom defined five buckets with skill areas:
There are two to four different areas in each bucket. For example, Intercom defines customer focus, analytics focus, and competitive insight as the key skill areas for the insights-driven bucket.
As part of their guidelines for using the framework, Intercom encourages PMs to:
Monzo is a popular digital bank and one of the earliest digital banks in the UK. The banking platform initially started with a basic career progression.
With time, they found that the basic career progression framework was hurting more than helping. The definitions were so limited that it was becoming a simple checklist activity hampering the personal growth of their engineers.
As a result, they reiterated and created a detailed engineering progression document outlining the:
Progression from one level to the next happens as a result of conversations between an individual and their manager.
This new framework is grounded in impact so employees can understand their impact on the company’s success and what contribution is expected from each role level.
Carta is an equity management and ownership platform. Carta’s engineering career framework has eight levels and an additional level for interns.
What determines the movement from one level to a higher level is impact:
Carta’s example of a career progression framework isn’t linear. Moving up some levels is relatively more challenging than others. For example, moving up the “industry” path is more complicated than progressing on “tasks.”
To level up, workers have to demonstrate consistent performance at the next level over a significant period. Therefore, career progression is relatively slower because of the thorough scrutiny required in the process.
Interestingly, Carta expects its workers to consistently grow their skills and scale their impact so that they will receive promotions every few years (until reaching L5, considered a terminal level). Being stuck in a level for too long can be a performance issue.
Management is never a promotion from being an engineer. It is a lateral move, with the following levels:
Salary increases linearly—with increasing seniority, salary increases about linearly, but equity compensation increases superlinearly (after the senior levels). In the lower levels, a person’s remuneration is their overall compensation. In contrast, most of an employee’s compensation comes from equity in the top levels.
Anyone who has ever attempted to create a career framework from scratch knows what a massive task it is. Moreover, as industries and technologies continuously evolve, so do competency needs. As a result, your current skills frameworks may be obsolete in no time.
Deel Engage will help you accelerate this process and integrate career frameworks with other critical HR processes. Our systeEngage’ss you to:
Book a demo to see how our solutions will help you define comprehensive career progression frameworks that build a high-performance workforce.
With Deel Engage, we can clearly outline career paths and roles aligned with our values, streamline feedback processes, and encourage personal growth.
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About the author
Lorelei Trisca is a content marketing manager passionate about everything AI and the future of work. She is always on the hunt for the latest HR trends, fresh statistics, and academic and real-life best practices. She aims to spread the word about creating better employee experiences and helping others grow in their careers.
