This is a step-by-step guide on how to implement the entire career framework for a company between 51-500 employees.

Depending on the level of customization you want to do it’ll take you from a couple of days to a maximum of 3 weeks until you can launch your framework to your company.

Remember, you can always revise your career framework later. It is a living framework that will grow and evolve and scale with your company. 🚀

Step 1: Create your departments

To organize your career paths you first need to add your departments in which you'll have career paths. Go to Career > Add group and add all your departments, first.

Step 2: Go through the templates and copy all templates for your departments and roles

Choose the related job families for your company and copy all the templates into your account.

💡 Note: Per department, there is always one or more Individual Contributor (IC) tracks and one People Manager (PM) track. Learn more why: Zavvy's framework for 50-500 employees. You can recognize them by the naming convention. For example:

Customer Success Manager Track = People Manager track (PM) Customer Success = Individual Contributor (IC)

Step 3: Revise the levels and add/remove them if necessary

For example, you just have two levels in your customer success department. Just remove the one you don’t need.

💡 If you plan to grow, it is also a good idea to keep the levels even if you don’t have people on that level yet, because you give your people a future trajectory of where they can grow.

Step 4: Choose and revise competencies

The competencies and descriptions you find in our template stem from hundreds of SaaS companies and their best practices. However, you can adjust the competencies and competency categories as you like.

Adjusting Competency categories:

The competency categories (Working together, Driving results, Adapting and growing, Leading and inspiring, and functional competencies) are based on all the competencies of hundreds of SaaS companies. So they are a great starting point. However, some companies choose to do it differently. You can easily use different grouping for the core competencies if you like

• Wording: For example, instead of “driving results”, you can use “aiming results”. To change the category, go to the specific competency and delete the tag and re-enter the tag.
• Company values at categories: For example, some companies categorize competencies into their company values. In that case, you can change the category of competency based on your company values. For example, you can include time management under leading and inspiring instead of driving results.
• Additional categories: Each competency can get more than one competency category. You can also group them additionally as “hard skills, soft skills,” etc. This is super helpful is you would like to compare all your people on hard or soft skills.

Step 4: Invite team leads and get feedback

You’ll need your department leads on board to revise and advocate for the career paths of their departments. The template is a great starting point and you take a lot of work off their shoulders. However, you’ll need them to agree and be on your side.

Therefore we advise you to invite your department leads to Zavvy and let them revise and sign off on the career paths of their departments.

How to invite other people and make them admins?

💡 Learn here: Invite new team members

To involve your team leads, we have a template for you. However, next to writing a message it might be a good idea to seek out a personal conversation and/or schedule a kick-off meeting to get everyone onboard.

Template message to department leads

💡 Zavvy support is happy to help you with this process of involving managers and department leads. We’ve conducted multiple workshops and kick-offs in the past and can help you make launching the new framework a success. Just reach out to us!

Step 6: Launch your career framework to the company

Now, that your career paths are ready and vetted by your department heads and team leads, you’re ready to launch it and assign everyone their current role.

To do so, simply go to Zavvy and assign everyone their career path and level.

Step 6.1) Click on the assign button in a career path on the level you want to assign

Step 6.2) Pick the person you want to assign the level to

Outcome:

People will receive a notification about the career path they’ve just been assigned to and they will be able to see their role level in their account.

Exemplary notification the assignee receives when you assign them a role card:

How people see their role level:

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