Using the Ladder Outside Construx

Construx has used the Professional Development Ladder to provide structured and flexible support for career development within Construx. By defining and developing capabilities across numerous CKAs, Construx ensures that our staff has both depth and breadth which is consistent with an engineering approach to software development. Through the flexible ladder framework, our technical staff can choose career progressions well matched to their interests.

Construx's capability requirements are more intensive than most companies' requirements due to our corporate mission of "Advancing the Art and Science of Commercial Software Engineering." Most of our senior software engineers consult, teach, and lead projects, which means more of our employees need to achieve Leadership levels than employees in other organizations.

We have found that basing the ladder on the SWEBOK knowledge areas has provided us with significant advantages. Factoring the CKAs into a 10x3 matrix means that the Professional Development Ladder can easily be tailored to add or remove capability levels, knowledge areas, and specific ladder requirements for the needs of other software organizations. Using the 10x3 structure, specific career paths for example, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Developer, and Tester can be defined on top of the Professional Development Ladder to provide structure and guidance within an organization that doesn't wish to expose the inner workings of the ladder to its staff.

The details will vary when the ladder is deployed within different organizations, but the ladder's structure and key concepts can be deployed in any organization. The underlying ladder foundation provides a high degree of integrity in each case.