A model to help you decide on a career path to follow

In previous articles, I talked about personal growth plans for individual contributors and how we can help our team members achieve their goals.

There’s an analogy I use with my team members before they commit to a career path, and as it looks like a trident, it makes sense to call it that way.

(I am using engineering examples here.)

The trident

The trident is useful in showing the possibilities an individual has for their next step and the opportunities they might have.

This assumes the individual sticks to their profession, of course, and it should look differently if the individual decides to switch one (i.e., move to product management or become a musician).

The bottom

We all start at that point as junior engineers and advance upward on that trunk before we need to reach a decision — where do we want our career to advance?

The managerial path

The one that is the most known and well-defined. The number of books written on the matter is endless, and this has received the most focus since the Industrial Revolution (maybe even before).

That might include team lead, group manager, director, VP R&D, and CTO in engineering.

The individual contributor path

That path includes “staying” a team member while having more responsibility for more complex tasks. This includes developing new initiatives, planning and understanding the required resources, mentoring others in the team (or group), and advancing general knowledge.

In engineering, that might include — senior, staff, and principal engineers.
As opposed to the managerial path, this is a new path, and so the definitions of the role and the responsibilities differ between teams.

The tech-leadership path

Another relatively new path is tech leadership.

This is generally an engineer with wider responsibilities across teams and groups, has allocated resources, sometimes manages a small team of individual contributors, builds internal tools for the benefit of other engineers, leads efforts and guilds, and has a vast knowledge of how things play along nicely.

In engineering, that might include tech leads, guild heads, architects, and so on.

As opposed to ICs, they have a wider view across the company and have resources at their disposal. They still mentor and work mostly on innovation.

A fork in the road

The trident has a special feature in it that I like. At the point where the three dents split, they become farther away from each other.

In a way, this is a good representation of the possibility to “switch” paths midway. The more you progress in one, the harder it gets to switch to the other.

While it might be relatively easy, for instance, to start as a team lead and then decide to switch to the IC path, it’s harder to advance in the managerial path. You’ll slowly get farther from the code or the state-of-the-art technology and then switch to another path.

The good news is that you don’t have to commit to one path while having no option to “go back,” but be aware that the more you are on one, it can become harder later.

I show this analogy to my team members (ICs, tech leads, and managers) and challenge them to position themselves on it and try to imagine where they want to go next based on that.

This loop backs nicely to setting their personal growth plan where you can define their goal based on the trident, look at their possibilities and options, and determine what they need to learn and accomplish to reach that goal.

The Career-Paths Trident was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.