📈 Career Development

What does career development mean at ultimate.ai ? 🧐

Career development is more than just promotions. It’s supporting you to grow and thrive at ultimate.ai

Your progression for us means empowering you to take initiative in your own career, while providing guidance on how you can achieve your aspirations at ultimate.ai

Career growth can take many forms, your role is constantly evolving and you are learning every day. No doubt, this is growth and we do recognise it. Introducing a clear career path framework gives everyone clarity and transparency about how this personal development and growth turns into a step on your career path. 

The types of career paths 🛣

We are relatively early to start developing a complicated career matrix and purposely creating unnecessary hierarchy. However we want to start creating a path to provide a strong foundation and to introduce a formal way to acknowledge career progression.

There are two typical types of career paths that we identify in the organisation right now, and we build career progression within these:

• The Maker path: the path towards seniority is not only managing an increasing number of employees. You don’t need to be a people manager to be able progress and be awesome at your role, senior individual contributors are extremely important for the company. Growth within a role is enabled with the maker path. As a “maker”, you can focus on becoming an expert in your area or also taking ownership on a project/chapter/ product etc.

• People Manager path: if you are born to be a leader, we give space for you to grow into a people manager role. 

The Framework 🪜

A career path looks different in each team, but a company-wide framework guides consistency, and ensures that different teams handle progressions the same way. 

A career progression framework is needed to:

• Provide us with a ‘common language’ for talking about promotion, progression and seniority

• Equip managers to be able to create a path for their team

• Define a path for individual contributors and managers

• Provide objective standards to measure progress and explain what someone has to do to progress

• Bring clarity and consistency to the team

The framework consists of Levels, the description of the expectation on each level is provided here. We identified 6 levels of career progression on a maker path and 3 levels of the People Manager path.
To break down the expectation, our company values are used as attributes to describe each level:

• Trust

• Impact

• Customer Succes

• Ethics

The Levels framework is the backbone the career progression/career path at the company. Each team will use this framework to set the career path within the team.

(As the framework evolves over time, we'll add more granularity around specific skill sets – but the expectations of each level will remain consistent.)

The Levels

Alternative ways 🛰

There are other not so typical career paths that we handle on a case by case basis, as on unique cases it’s hard to build a progression framework, such as:

• Cross-departmental path: If you are still on a mission to find your true calling and an opportunity arises in the company that you are keen on, then we plan the next steps together to support you with your move

Please note that the Levels framework has been rolled out out starting from May first in R&D. Then a framework will be tailored to each team one by one.