Journeys are the essence of Agile Growth™, these will guide your team members on their professional growth in a way that allows them to gain skills and knowledge that will be valuable to them as individuals and also to the organization.
Through waystones.io you can build gamified Journeys tailored to your organization, roles, and culture. These Journeys will be visible to everyone at the organization so people will have the tools to take the lead on their own professional growth.
Journeys are made of a set of Milestones so to start creating your Journeys you will start by creating Milestones. What we want to start doing is to turn your current roles or paths into Milestones.
Creating Milestones is not a science meaning that every organization can have different approaches on how to define them. However, we have created a set of steps that helps new organizations get started with this process. In this blog post we will walk you through the first of the steps.
To begin with, make sure you choose one role you want to focus on and then you are ready to dive into these steps. If this is the first time you are going to go through this exercise find a role that either:
- Has a lot of employees or
- Has a low retention rate
Inspiration
You have already selected the role you want to focus on but now try to be more specific. Choose one to three people who are in this role and that represent the ideal description of what this role should look like.
Take some time to describe this group of people, what are they doing that makes them so special? What knowledge do they have? Which tasks are they responsible for? Make a list and try to be as thorough and detailed as possible. Make sure to include both technical and soft skills. For this exercise you can also get input from people who are in contact and work with the people you chose to use as inspiration, they will help you find those traits that make these people so valuable and will also have input on more specific details.
At the end of this exercise you will have a full ideal description of this role. Take a look at your description and review that has a good mix of responsibilities, tasks and knowledge.
Below you will find an example of a description of our imaginary “Ideal QA”.
This is it for the first step! During the next steps we will turn this description into a real Journey that other team members can follow and work on. We will define measurable attributes, valuable knowledge and different skill levels so the Journeys can be followed by someone who is just starting their career or even someone who already has some experience under their belt.
In the next blog post, we’ll dive into Step 2 – Grouping by Similarity, where we’ll group all of these attributes to have a better understanding of the types of skills this person needs to have.