How we support people with their career path
The key aim of our career model at Infinity Works is to support everyone who works here in being able to progress along a path that works for them. We’ve always put huge emphasis on hiring and developing great people and that includes giving them autonomy and trust to shape their career for themselves. As we’ve grown, we’ve needed to provide some structure and clarity, but just enough to help rather than to stifle that freedom.
In our latest version of our career model, we’ll outline the components that help people understand the opportunities and roles they can take on Infinity Works and the key skills we look for in everyone, which help people and the company thrive. Together with some lightweight tools to explore career path and facilitate meaningful conversations around progress, these help individuals choose how they’d like to develop both at Infinity Works and beyond.
Our core skills help you understand what the key things are that we value in everyone at Infinity Works
Core skills help you understand how to gain more influence and responsibility in your career. For Infinity Works they represent the behaviours which help us to be a successful consultancy and which we feel help people grow in their career. Broken down into seven skills, if you can build on these you’ll be able to take on more roles and open up more opportunities to learn and develop
To explore and understand your core skills, we’ve created an interactive tool which allows people to understand what these are and where they currently see themselves. It’s also of course a good starting point for a conversation around how to develop the skills that are of interest, or that may be required to take on certain roles.
For every role that exists at Infinity Works there is a role guide that describes what it means to do that role well
Role guides detail the skills, responsibilities and techniques that are associated with a given role. Rather than reading like a typical job description, the aim is to help people identify with what the role really means in practice and allow them to consider if it’s something they’re currently doing or may aspire to do in future.
Three key concepts underpin our career model. They’re essential in ensuring it remains a supportive framework and not a typical corporate scheme.
Own your career
Everyone who works at Infinity Works is an individual with unique strengths and ambitions, and their own idea as to what career progression looks like. We don’t want to stifle that or constrain how people can progress. Autonomy and empowerment are vitally important to us and it doesn’t make sense to try to force people down one route.
Instead we see the company role as to show clearly what Infinity Works wants to achieve and what we value in everyone, and allow people to use that to guide them. But ultimately your career is exactly that – yours. Hence the career model at Infinity Works aims to support rather than dictate; by doing so we encourage individuals to take ownership of developing their career in a way which works for them.
Progression is a path not a ladder
We firmly believe that progression is about growth and learning, acquiring new skills and experiences and widening your breadth of knowledge. As a consultancy, we’re in a good place to support that — different clients and different technologies mean that even the same role by title may be different and varied within different engagements.
We also acknowledge that progression to some means increasing their level of influence, responsibility and involvement in shaping Infinity Works and we want to support that too.
The key thing is that people can find out what works for them and progress in that way.
That’s why our career model avoids presenting a ladder to climb but instead goes with the analogy of plotting a path. The path that people choose is flexible to them, and may involve steps in different directions as they try new things and figure out what they like and what they’re great at.
Professional identity is multifaceted
One piece of feedback we’ve had from people who work at Infinity Works is that they love the fact they’re not pigeon-holed to just one role or specialism. As a business we require a wide range of skills and competencies, so we really do encourage people to focus on what they are good at, what makes them happy and what they would like to learn in the future.
The concept of role guides is to help give some clarity and structure, but we’re retaining the flexibility of allowing people to identify with several roles at once and work to progress against the roles they aspire to do. We’re also keen to allow people to continue to choose how they identify professionally in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Career tools
Our main aim for our career model is to provide a tool for people to use for reflection in considering their career and progression — this is absolutely key to owning your career. Through our Advocacy model there’s support for this too, allowing useful career conversations to a schedule that works for each individual. These allow people to check on how they’re progressing and whether their goals or aspirations have shifted.
We encourage regular feedback as a useful input too; involving account leads or colleagues helps people understand whether they’re progressing as they’d like. In order to help with the above, we’ve created a number of tools to help. As discussion is often the most valuable part, these are tools to help facilitate conversation and thought rather than measure. But of course they provide a useful way for people to track their progress too.
These are the tools we’ve come up with:
Career maps help you plot out your career path to date and chart where you might like to go
The Choose your own career path tool is a simple tool to allow you to map out the steps in your career. These may be steps you’ve taken to date or where you’d like to progress in future.
Rather than be too restrictive, the aim is that by discussing and visualising steps and plotting these out as a path, people can reflect and plan what matters to them and where they may wish to go in their career. Steps aren’t constrained to a certain size or meant to mean just one thing – they’re whatever makes sense for that individual. The map is also not to scale – for someone early on in their career it makes more sense for the steps to be much more granular and detailed, as opposed to someone perhaps 20 years in. Ultimately it’s what helps them understand the patterns and directions their career is taking. We feel it works best as conversation between advocate and individual, perhaps with account lead or colleagues too.
The tool is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.
Our core skills help you understand what the key things are that we value in everyone at Infinity Works
Core skills help you understand how to gain more influence and responsibility in your career. For Infinity Works they represent the behaviours which help us to be a successful consultancy and which we feel help people grow in their career. Broken down into seven skills, if you can build on these you’ll be able to take on more roles and open up more opportunities to learn and develop.
