Breaking down software engineering career frameworks

Career frameworks have been helping software engineers grow for years. When I started looking at frameworks for software engineering, I noticed that there were a number of different approaches, but very little guidance on why you should choose one over another. In this blog post I’ll help you to understand three types of career frameworks, explain why you may choose to use each of them, provide examples for you to look at and give you guidance on how you can build your own.

Scaled assessment framework

A scaled assessment framework is a generic set of skills relevant to a particular job. Often, a scaled assessment framework will identify a set of skills, such as Java or communication, and the person being evaluated is rated on a scale presented independently of the skills themselves.

This scale could be simple, such as 1–5, or more descriptive, such as awareness, proficient, or expert.

Goals

A scaled assessment framework is generally used to identify an individual’s experience with a particular technology or skill. The output is an effective way to communicate experience across a wide variety of skills.

You will often find people use this type of framework in CVs, and professional services companies may use one when exploring team layout options or for sales purposes.

A good example of this style can be seen in academic self-evaluation scales such as those used by Texas A&M University-Commerce, where the scale itself carries most of the meaning.

Drawbacks

Experience and competence are two totally different things and are often conflated within a scaled assessment framework.

It is easy to express experience on a scale, for example “I worked 5 years with Java,” but much harder to express competence in a consistent way, for example “I am 5/5 or expert with Java.”

This leads to:

• high subjectivity
• inconsistent interpretation of levels
• very little guidance on how to improve

How to build one

A scaled assessment framework is the most straightforward career framework to build.

It requires you to identify a range of skills, both specific and broad, that are important to your organization. These skills can be written without much additional detail, because the scale contains the definition of competence.

The scale, therefore, needs enough context to help an individual evaluate themselves effectively.

Career ladder

A career ladder highlights the key skills and behaviours that an employee is expected to demonstrate at each level of their career within an organization.

For example, at the bottom of a career ladder you would see the skills required to be considered a junior software engineer, and nearer to the top you would see those expected of a senior software engineer.

Goals

The goals of a career ladder are focused on communication.

They communicate:

• what is expected at each level
• how levels differ from each other
• the general areas someone needs to grow in

A well-constructed career ladder can significantly improve clarity around progression and can help individuals understand what it takes to reach the next level.

A commonly referenced example is the engineering ladder published by Rent the Runway, which clearly differentiates expectations across levels without becoming overly prescriptive.

Drawbacks

The primary drawback of a career ladder is that it does not offer a clear and actionable set of steps for individual growth.

Because the skills are, by necessity, relatively generic, they cannot represent the specific growth paths of different specializations such as frontend versus backend.

Additionally, many career ladders struggle with progression paths:

• a single track that leads toward management
• a split between IC and management tracks

Both approaches can feel restrictive compared to how careers actually evolve in practice.

How to build one

Building a career ladder is a challenging process that requires:

• a clear definition for each level
• well-defined skills and behaviours at each level

One of the key challenges is providing the appropriate level of detail without becoming too granular.

A common approach is to start from an existing career ladder and adapt it for your organization, paying close attention to the level of detail and relevance of each skill.

Growth framework

A growth framework differs from the previous two approaches because of its focus on progressive development of skills.

A growth framework is generally driven by a model for skills acquisition, such as the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition or a similar progression model.

This model is used to represent growth along the y-axis of a grid, for example novice through to advanced, while categories or skill areas are represented along the x-axis.

These categories are then filled with specific expectations that describe what progression looks like in each area.

Goals

The main goal of a growth framework is to provide clear and actionable growth objectives.

Because they are more granular than the other types of frameworks, they provide a structured way to:

• understand how skills develop
• identify gaps at an individual level
• identify gaps at a team level

A strong public example is the capability framework published by GOV.UK, which shows how structured progression can be applied across roles.

Drawbacks

The biggest drawback of a growth framework is the cost of building and maintaining it.

While AI can help generate an initial draft, the difficult part is:

• defining meaningful progression
• ensuring consistency across categories
• maintaining the framework as the organization evolves

Another limitation is that, on its own, a growth framework does not clearly communicate what is expected at each job level, for example senior engineer. That mapping needs to be layered on top.

How to build one

Building a growth framework is the most challenging approach and requires a strong understanding of both:

• the skills that matter for your organization
• how those skills develop over time

A typical process looks like:

1. Define a progression model
2. Identify key categories
3. Define expectations for each category and level

Choosing the right one for you

It is clear that having a career framework for software engineers is important for scaling a team effectively. The right choice depends on your goals and how much you want to invest in building and maintaining it.

	Scaled assessment	Career ladder	Growth framework
Building one is	straightforward	complex	highly complex
Communicates	skill exposure	expectations per level	growth within skills
Evaluation subjectivity	very high	high	medium
Tool required	no	no	often
Flexibility	high	limited	high
Identifying skill gaps	low	low	high

I do not recommend using a scaled assessment framework except in cases where you need a very lightweight way to communicate skills at a general level.

When it comes to choosing between a career ladder and a growth framework, the decision is more nuanced:

• If communication of career levels is your primary goal, a career ladder provides the most value
• If you are looking to build a more structured approach to growth, a growth framework is more effective

In practice, many organizations benefit from combining the two approaches.

Combining approaches

Career ladders and growth frameworks solve different problems.

• Career ladders communicate expectations at a level
• Growth frameworks describe how skills develop

Combining them allows you to:

• define what is expected at each level
• provide more detailed guidance on how to get there

This combination provides better support for both communication and growth, at the cost of increased complexity.

Where SkillsMap fits

Our aim with SkillsMap is to reduce the cost of building and maintaining these frameworks.

Rather than choosing between approaches, SkillsMap allows you to:

• define detailed expectations across levels
• map those expectations to job levels
• reuse competencies across job families
• evolve frameworks over time

The goal is to make it easier to build something that remains useful as your organization grows.

Closing

There isn’t a single “correct” way to structure a career framework.

The right approach depends on:

• what you want to communicate
• how much structure you need
• how much effort you’re willing to invest

What matters most is that the framework is clear, consistent, and usable by the people it is intended to support.