Chapter Sixteen. Construx s Professional Development Program

Chapter Sixteen. Construx's Professional Development Program

This chapter is adapted from the Construx Software white paper "Construx's Professional Development Program," © 2002 Construx Software Builders, Inc. Used with permission. The current white paper can be downloaded from www.construx.com/profession. I am indebted to Jenny Stuart, who drafted the original white paper.

How does a company support development of true software professionals? As I discussed in Chapter 6, overall software industry support for career development of software professionals is emerging, but still weak. Few universities offer undergraduate education in software engineering, and the number of graduates has fallen far short of the number needed to meet industry demands. This situation is improving rapidly, but it will still be years before university output is sufficient to meet industry needs.

Private industry is not supporting effective career development either. Rather than experiencing a career progression, most software workers simply move from one project to the next without any structured improvement of their skills. Few technology companies even try to offer career support for their software workers, and the software industry at large has nothing comparable to the career progression a physician would receive in a medical practice, an attorney would receive in a law practice, or an accountant would receive in an accounting practice.

Because of my long-standing interest in software professionalism, several years ago I set out to create explicit career pathing and professional development support for the software engineers at my company, Construx Software. We identified specific objectives in creating a professional development program for our software engineers:

• Skills enhancement. The primary purpose of our professional development program is to improve the skills of our employees.

• Career pathing. Our program needed to provide a structured path for improving the capabilities of Construx's software engineers throughout their employment with Construx.

• Support for common software job titles. Our professional development program needed to support the full range of software job titles including software developers, testers, business analysts, project managers, architects, and other common industry positions.

• Consistency. For ease of administration, the professional development program needed to support consistent means of evaluating employee performance and promoting technical staff regardless of technical specialization.

• Generalizability beyond Construx. After implementing the professional development program within Construx, we wanted to be able to offer the program to other companies to support the career development of their software professionals.