Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

Problem

As I onboard, I want my incoming engineers to feel like there is a vested interest in their success within the organization. It is important to me, to build a positive experience, that from the beginning, determines their career goals and where they would like to end up in their career.

Actions taken

• From the first beginning of the first one on one I have with my new engineers, I establish a line of open communication, focused on setting career-driven goals.
• I ask them to think about where they want to go in their career to better align them with the organization's goals.
• I help everyone write their OKR's by blocking off time and sitting down with them personally.
• Since I already review the OKR's, we maintain regular accountability meetings to make sure they are moving forward. We meet every Friday as a group and I put all the OKR's publicly on a company wiki called "Notion".

Lessons learned

• Once you know where an engineer wants to go in their career, you can start to structure those growth patterns as part of their OKR's.
• Sitting down with my engineers to write OKR's is beneficial in two ways. First, because they are unfamiliar with the process and need help. Secondly, I want to make sure they are properly aligning themselves with their career development.
• You can't just write an OKR and say 'okay, this is what you are going to do this quarter, end of story'. They need to be aligned with both career growth objectives and company growth objectives.
• OKR's are mutable. People often complain that their OKR's aren't working or are not driving a whole lot of value because they are hard to measure. It is important to remember that they are not set in stone.
• OKR's should always be public and measurable.
• I view OKR's as a way to potentially leverage yourself out of your comfort zone. If you want to grow as a person, you have to do something slightly out of your area of security, structuring your OKR's around that, so the company is investing in your developmentally.

"Once you know where an engineer wants to go in their career, you can start to structure those growth patterns as part of their OKR's."

"I view OKR's as a way to potentially leverage yourself out of your comfort zone."