Talent Development & Hiring

With a strong vision and new portfolio of services aligned with current market needs, the UX team entered an aggressive growth phase with a goal of doubling in three years. At the time, the team had a fair number of generalists and with our new focus on thought leadership consulting, we needed to hire and grow deeply knowlegable specialists.

To do this, we needed to create a shared understanding of the core responsibilities of every functional practice area at each stage of professional development. We crystalized on three core practices on our team:

A Framework for Growth

With such an emphasis on growth, we had to focus on growing our team and talent the right way. At the time, our team's process for career growth was ambiguous.

• Roles and expectations were ill-defined
• Our structure was flat and career milestones were not clear
• Team members did not know when or how to seek a promotion
• Senior and tenured team members were often looking for what's next in their career

We needed to provide our employees more rigor and clarity in their career development within our organization. I helped develop a new career progression strategy with members of WWT's employee development team that addressed the primary career development issues on our team.

We defined the core skill sets for the entire team and laid out the expectations for each career level.

We broke down each skill, laid out expectations and provided examples.

Principles

We saw a market need for authority and thought leadership in specific roles as well as the need to continue to grow our senior level talent. I drafted the role definition and process for selecting our senior and lead level contributors across all our practices (including our first Lead Engineer in Accessibility).

A Structured Promotion Process

Growing the team in a consistent and equitable way was also a key focus for me. Promotions can be a nerve-wracking ordeal. We previously had an ill-defined process that contributed to the anxiety team members faced when thinking about a promotion. I drafted and had approved a process that focused on: Clarity, Equity, Consistency, and Repeatability

Impacts

As of the end of 2022 we have a much larger team with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and career guidance.