As engineering leaders, it’s our job to make the folks in our team the most effective that they can be and to grow them to their full potential. But if engineers don’t know how to develop in a structured way, they’re more likely to feel disengaged - viewing career conversations and reviews as tick-box exercises. And equally, as a manager, if you don’t have structured ways to evaluate development, you’re more likely to fall victim to bad habits around progression - promoting focus on word of mouth or impression, which could place another barrier in front of engineers who are underrepresented in tech. 

At ASOS, we run quarterly surveys with our engineers and we heard that they were struggling to know how to grow themselves - and so we knew we had to do something about it. In this talk, Ed and Gareth will take you through how we built a comprehensive competency framework; starting from an initial MVP to where we are today - a dedicated web app powered through markdown files in GitHub and a Blazor Server App. They'll delve into the evolution of frameworks and tools, all with one goal in mind: crafting an engaging and user-friendly platform to drive meaningful development and career conversations. They'll also take you through how we shared our matrix with folks outside of engineering - and how they ended up adopting it too.

You’ll take away:

• Strategies for navigating constructive career conversations, both for yourself and others
• Effective frameworks and resources for constructing competency matrices
• An understanding of which platform of delivery is most effective for the career matrix