The 10-step skill ladder for you to achieve awesomeness
What does it mean to be the best software engineer possible? What does it mean to be the best designer? Or the best dentist, CEO, carpenter, recruiter, product manager? A decade ago I heard Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack Overflow, speaking about the idea of a “God page” to answer your programming questions, meaning, the web page that was so focused and clean that it only had one thing: the right answer to your question and nothing else.
The idea of the optimum solution to a problem is something that permeates the field of Computer Science. A decade ago when I heard Jeff talking about applying the software engineering concept of the optimum solution to design (of a web page) caused me to think about the “ideal” of everything, particularly, the ideal of myself and my career. What’s the best Marcelo possible?
If you divide any profession into the skills necessary to perform the job, you will end up with a list of dozens of skills. If you excel in all those skills, if you know how to combine them in the most optimum way, and if you have the motivation to do the work, you achieved the profession optimum point. No one can ever be better than that.
It’s a philosophical thought-provoking point and clearly, unachievable. However, if you start from there, from the optimum, it becomes easier to measure how far are you from that point. That’s how I’ve been measuring myself for a long time, although I wasn’t able to articulate it as clearly as I can now.
Recently, several people have been asking me to help with their career goals, from different professions, different starting points, and different skills needed. I wondered if I could abstract the ultimate career skill ladder for people to self-guide their career growth.
There are two parts to this self-guided career skill ladder: 1) the skills that an optimum professional needs to have, and 2) the grading system to measure how far along are you on each of those skills.
This post is about #2. I aimed to create a skill ladder that is agnostic to a specific profession so anyone can use it to measure themselves and how are they doing. It has ten levels, starting with the least competent you can be in a skill level to the most competent.
Skill Level 1
You don’t know it even exists or you haven’t even thought about it as a progressive skill set you need and your approach to that skill is lacking.
Skill Level 2
You know it exists, you can articulate what it is, and you have no (or very little) experience with it.
Skill Level 3
You have a little experience and you know some of the knowledge gaps you have and where to go to close that gap.
Skill Level 4
You can do it with guidance, in collaboration or under supervision from someone who’s more experienced.
Skill Level 5
You can do it to a minimum level of competency by yourself.
Skill Level 6
You can do it well. Other people who have this skill would say it was well done.
Skill Level 7
You can do it well and fast because you’ve been doing for several years/cycles.
Skill Level 8
You can do it effortlessly, accurately, and you can teach others how to do it well and fast.
Skill Level 9
You are a leader among your peers and you are sought after for your views on the topic, inside and outside of your company.
Skill Level 10
You are creating and disseminating new techniques, content, methodologies, and tools that elevate that skill competency across the profession and the industry.
This is not linearly progressive. It’s exponential. It might take you just a year to go from level 1 to level 5, but a decade or more to go from level 5 to level 7 or 8. By having observed many people over their careers and how well they perform their skills, most of them can’t get passed level 7 and very few get to level 8. Level 7 or 8 is a great place to be and if you get nearly all the skills for your profession to that level, you’ll be excellent!
A word of caution. It’s common to think of the skills of a profession as the hard skills required to perform in that profession. Hard skills are critical, but so are the soft skills. If you are a front-end software engineer, for sure CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and many other front-end technology skills are part of your career skill ladder that you want to track. However, you’ll also need communication, empathy, working with visual designers, and project management skills, just to list a few of them.
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