12 Career Progression Examples: Inspiration for Your Pathways

Without a clear map, employees get lost. And when they get lost, they might as well leave. A clear career progression framework helps employees understand where they are in their careers and what advancement opportunities for professional development await them within the company to build a successful career.

We carefully curated career progression framework examples to inspire your internal efforts. You will find 12 great career framework examples and the reasons why are a source of inspiration.

1. Singular Design: Career framework with levels and sublevels

Singular Design is a specialized software development company based in Miami, Florida. They use an intricate leveling system for their employees’ roles. They divide different roles into five levels and 15 sublevels:

• Junior (level) with three sublevels:
  • Junior A
  • Junior B
  • Junior C
• Advanced (level) with three sublevels:
  • Advanced A
  • Advanced B
  • Advanced C
• Specialist with three sublevels:
  • Specialist A
  • Specialist B
  • Specialist C
• Expert (level) with three sublevels:
  • Expert A
  • Expert B
  • Expert C
• Senior Expert with three sublevels:
  • Senior Expert A
  • Senior Expert B
  • Senior Expert C

Singular Design kicked off the partnership with Deel Engage by assessing all employees and assigning them to a particular sublevel on their intricate leveling matrix.

Once they identified the level of each employee, it was time to create detailed competency-based role descriptions to identify the skills and attributes for each level. Competency-based descriptions help set clear expectations in advance.

To speed up the process, they used Deel’s Engage’s AI assistant to create all job descriptions. The best part is that they could generate all descriptions in Spanish, their corporate language.

Singular Design connected all the dots—from feedback to competency models, career development plans, and guided reminders—without the frustration of manually updating spreadsheets.

2. Buffer: Career framework with dual maker and manager paths

Buffer prides itself on its high employee retention. Hailley Griffis, Head of Communications and Content at Buffer, has been with the company for over eight years. She says one key reason for this was that she could find development opportunities that kept her challenged and interested in the work every day.

Buffer has a career progression framework that caters to growth opportunities beyond the traditional management track. Individual contributors (makers) and managers have different career paths at Buffer.

Any maker will have different levels in their career path. For instance, a particular engineering role can have the following levels:

• Level 1: Entry
• Level 2: Developing
• Level 3: Career
• Level 4: Advanced
• Level 5: Expert
• Level 6: Principal

Likewise, managers have different levels in their career path leading up to the director level:

• Level 1: Lead/Manager 1
• Level 2: Lead/Manager 2
• Level 3: Senior Manager/Associate Director/Head of
• Level 4: Director

Jumping from one level to the next implies a significant and distinct improvement in terms of area knowledge, role complexity, and overall scope, similar to promotions in most companies. Additionally, these moves are subject to a calibration process.

But Buffer’s framework is not restricted to a (dual) career ladder. They also incorporate a horizontal framework, with four steps nested within each level.

For example, the four steps for level three are:

Step 1:

• Ownership: Co-owns projects and owns pieces of larger projects in their area completely
• Initiative: Makes good decisions within their scope without seeking consensus

Step 2:

• Ownership: Fully owns projects in their area with guidance
• Initiative: Makes good decisions within their scope without seeking consensus

Step 3:

• Ownership: Fully owns projects in their area with decreasing guidance
• Initiative: Takes initiative through identifying gaps and opportunities

Step 4:

• Ownership: Fully owns projects in their area completely
• Initiative: Takes initiative through identifying gaps and opportunities

Each area director can interpret and build upon the four-step framework to create area-specific examples and principles.

A step change can happen anytime, and an employee can jump multiple steps at once. The change occurs at the discretion of each area director. Additionally, a step change does not require approval or discussions outside of the specific area (department).

3. Spotify: Technology career track

Spotify strives to ensure that as employees grow their careers, they have a more significant impact on the company.

The company’s career framework is known as The Steps Framework. It has three main elements:

1. The discipline is an employee’s area of expertise, such as software development, engineering, project management, etc.
2. The role refers to how a person interacts with the team, department, or discipline—examples of roles are software engineer, product owner, tester, etc.
3. The step is a set of behaviors and expectations connected with an employee’s impact on the company—employees move from one step to another as their impact grows

The main steps for any role are:

• Individual step
• Squad/chapter step
• Tribe/guild step
• Technology/company step

There are different expectations for each step. For example, these are the expectations from the squad and chapter step:

• Values team success over individual success
• Continuously improves (self and team)
• Holds themselves and others accountable
• Thinks about business impact

Employee remuneration depends on their current step. Technically, steps are measured by professional growth. The manager and team members regularly discuss the steps in their meetings. As employees cross milestones, their impact on the company grows, and they also grow by moving to the next step.

4. Dropbox: Impact-based engineering career framework

Dropbox is a modern file-hosting service platform that securely stores files. It enables users to collaborate, share, and sync files from any device with friends, family, and coworkers.

The Dropbox framework is based on impact, which for Dropbox means serving customers better to help Dropbox succeed.

Dropbox's engineering career framework is divided into two components:

• Level expectations: These define the scope, collaborative reach, and levers for impact at every level—these determine the differences between levels
• Core responsibilities and craft expectations: These define the specific behaviors associated with an employee’s role and team—these showcase how to work to deliver the impact according to level expectations

There are four pillars to the core responsibilities:

• Results
• Direction
• Talent
• Culture

Craft expectations refer to discipline-specific technical capabilities employees need to master.

The career framework helps managers set expectations and hold teams accountable for their work, thus linking it to performance management. Additionally, it showcases how engineers can achieve a more significant impact in their roles and grow their careers.

Interestingly, Dropbox’s career framework doesn’t provide guidance on how workers can move to the next level. Each level describes the end state of the qualities one needs to have.

Engineers have transparent conversations with their managers about goals and gaps to understand how to move to the next level.

5. Songkick: Software developer career growth framework

Most concert lovers are familiar with Songkick. However, there is a reason why the company is labeled as a good place for people to kick-start their careers.

When defining their career growth framework, Songkick divided the high-impact roles into two sections:

• Individual contributors (technical experts)
• People management

They also defined career paths related to individual contributors and people management roles.

They describe all levels and responsibilities in the context of seven skills that cut across all roles:

• Leadership
• Mentorship
• Technical skills
• Communication
• Emotional intelligence
• Delivery
• Business knowledge

Whether an employee should move from their current role to a new role is a discussion between the person and their manager. However, they must master a good percentage of the responsibilities between three and six months to be deemed ready to move to the next step.

Songkick advises their workers and managers to use this document as part of routines such as 1:1s, OKR planning, and review cycles, framing it as a source of truth for setting goals, direction, focus, and growth.

6. Wise: Product management career map

Wise revamped their career paths after noticing that the existing framework lacked details on in-depth role specification.

Currently, Wise’s product career path is divided into seven different career levels:

• Product Manager 0
• Product Manager 1
• Product Manager 2
• Product Manager 3
• Product Lead 1
• Product Lead 2
• Product Lead 3

Each job title comprehensively describes the skills, responsibilities, and behavioral indicators for success.

The different levels give employees a clear view of level-specific expectations and how to progress to the next level.

Wise also mentions the salary of each level in advance for complete transparency.

Wise’s career map complements other HR processes such as coaching conversations and annual 360 feedback reviews, at the end of which employees and their managers refine their individual development plans. These plans help employees define the steps toward increased impact in the organization, enabling them to progress in their roles.

7. Wise: Engineering career map with dual paths

Wise’s engineering career track includes dual paths for individual contributors and engineering team leads.

For individual contributor roles, they define six levels:

• Engineer - IC 1
• Engineer - IC 2
• Engineer - IC 3
• Engineer - IC 4
• Engineer - IC 5
• Engineer - IC 6

For engineering team leads, they define four levels:

• Engineering Lead 1
• Engineering Lead 2
• Engineering Lead 3
• Engineering Lead 4

These levels are cumulative, so engineers must perform well in all expectations up to their current level. As a result, to fully understand the expectations from an IC4, one needs to consult the expectations from the three previous levels.

The dual path approach showcases how individual contributors can grow in their technical roles and become technical subject matter experts or take the leadership route and follow engineering lead positions.

Engineering team leads oversee their teams' career growth, well-being, and performance and work with the rest of the product organization, contributing to the company’s strategy and roadmaps. They execute and create these strategies.

There are four pillars for each level, IC and EL:

• Scope: Area of influence for the specific role
• Product: Tasks expected in the role
• Leadership: Soft skills, such as mentoring, coaching, culture, support, team contribution, and advocacy are expected for the role
• Expertise: Area of expertise such as technical, design, architectural, process or organizational skills for the role

8. Rent the Runway: Software Development/Leadership Ladder

Rent the Runway (RTR) is a popular clothing rental subscription service that allows customers to rent designer apparel and accessories. When the company first launched its engineering ladder, there was too much room for interpretation, creating anxiety and confusion throughout the organization.

They use Excel to host their framework. Role expectations cover four categories:

• Dex (Technical skill)
• Str (Get stuff done)
• Wis (Impact)
• Cha (Communication and leadership)

The first two categories are the primary drivers of lower-level promotions, with RTR defining them as “adder attributes.” As a worker advances on the ladder, the importance shifts to the last two attributes—” multiplier attributes.”

RTN also highlights the “maturity level ups” within the framework, referring to level jumps that bring significant changes in expectations and duties. For example:

• Advancing from Engineer II to Senior Engineer I
• Advancing from Staff Engineer to Senior Staff Engineer
• Advancing from Senior Staff Engineer to Principle Engineer

9. Kickstarter: Engineering and data career paths

Crowdfunding company Kickstarter’s framework is a ladder with different steps. Kickstarter engineering and data roles have three career paths:

• Technical: Technical roles are those that don’t revolve around people’s leadership—advancement within this path means increasing levels of technical responsibility and leadership
• Data: Data refers to roles built around the data team
• People: Roles responsible for people leadership and management within the Engineering department—however, managers might split their time between technical tasks and people management

The distinction in each role is based on skill sets and techniques in literature and research.

There are ranks or categories within each role an employee can rise to. The Kickstarter framework is presented in a straightforward document with clearly defined roles for each job family.

10. Intercom: Product management career path

Intercom is a messaging platform with over 630 employees.

Intercom’s product management career framework defines four levels:

• Associate PM
• PM
• Senior PM
• Principal PM

To formulate descriptions for each role level, Intercom defined five buckets with skill areas:

• Insight-driven: This bucket emphasizes the importance of PMs being attuned to both customer feedback and data analytics to inform decisions and validate product claims
• Strategy: Focuses on the ability to translate high-level company strategy into actionable product roadmaps and facilitate strategic discussions within the team
• Execution: Highlights the significance of effectively turning ideas into deliverables by adhering to R&D principles, such as starting with the problem and shipping iteratively
• Driving outcomes: Ensures PMs prioritize initiatives based on their potential impact and deliver measurable results without compromising on shipping speed
• Leadership behaviors: Encompasses essential leadership qualities like communication, collaboration, ownership, and decisiveness and aligns PM behaviors with the company’s core values

There are two to four different areas in each bucket. For example, Intercom defines customer focus, analytics focus, and competitive insight as the key skill areas for the insights-driven bucket.

As part of their guidelines for using the framework, Intercom encourages PMs to:

• Ask peers to give feedback based on level-specific expectations
• Assess their own performance in growth areas and share it with their manager regularly

11. Monzo: Engineering Progression Framework

Monzo is a popular digital bank and one of the earliest digital banks in the UK. The banking platform initially started with a basic career progression.

With time, they found that the basic career progression framework was hurting more than helping. The definitions were so limited that it was becoming a simple checklist activity hampering the personal growth of their engineers.

As a result, they reiterated and created a detailed engineering progression document outlining the:

• Impact: Measures a worker’s sphere of influence and individual input on Monzo’s success as a business
• Technical skills: Refers to an engineer’s technical contribution at different levels of complexity and ambiguity
• Behaviors: A collection of expectations and development areas for engineers that do not fall into the categories of technical skill

Progression from one level to the next happens as a result of conversations between an individual and their manager.

This new framework is grounded in impact so employees can understand their impact on the company’s success and what contribution is expected from each role level.

12. Carta: Engineering parallel IC and management tracks

Carta is an equity management and ownership platform. Carta’s engineering career framework has eight levels and an additional level for interns.

What determines the movement from one level to a higher level is impact:

• L1: Associate software engineer—this is a learning level where recent coding bootcamp graduates and employees who want to give engineering a try without any formal job experience can go—as a result, the primary focus at this level is not on producing value
• L2: Software engineer I is measured on the impact on tasks
• L3: Software engineer II is measured on the impact on features
• L4: Senior software engineer I is measured on the impact on problems
• L5: Senior software engineer II is measured on the impact on teams—regarded as a “terminal” level for many individual contributors who are not interested in leadership
• L6: Staff software engineer is measured on the impact on the organization
• L7: Senior staff software engineer is measured on the impact on the company
• L8: Principal software engineer is measured on the impact on the industry

Carta’s example of a career progression framework isn’t linear. Moving up some levels is relatively more challenging than others. For example, moving up the “industry” path is more complicated than progressing on “tasks.”

To level up, workers have to demonstrate consistent performance at the next level over a significant period. Therefore, career progression is relatively slower because of the thorough scrutiny required in the process.

Interestingly, Carta expects its workers to consistently grow their skills and scale their impact so that they will receive promotions every few years (until reaching L5, considered a terminal level). Being stuck in a level for too long can be a performance issue.

Management is never a promotion from being an engineer. It is a lateral move, with the following levels:

• M4: Tech lead manager (the equivalent of an L4 engineer on the management track): Splits their time between technical work and people management for a small team of engineers
• M5: Engineering manager (the equivalent of an L5 engineer on the management track, also considered a terminal level): People management becomes the majority of their focus, leading a single, larger team and driving all the key talent management processes—hiring and interviewing, mentoring and guiding the career development of their direct reports
• M6: Senior engineering manager (the equivalent of an L6 engineer on the management track): Start to manage other engineering managers or tech lead managers, working cross-functionally with stakeholders across the business and delivering work that impacts the whole engineering organization
• M7: Director (the equivalent of an L7 engineer on the management track): Responsible for resourcing, planning, and strategizing with your teams to solve business and technical problems at scale for which solutions are not already known
• M8: Senior director (the equivalent of a principal (L8) engineer on the management track): Responsible for identifying new opportunities for the company, planning and resourcing to tackle them, executing against that plan, and delivering value to both internal and external stakeholders
• M9: VP: Sets the strategic direction of the company and held directly accountable for the performance of the entire organization

Salary increases linearly—with increasing seniority, salary increases about linearly, but equity compensation increases superlinearly (after the senior levels). In the lower levels, a person’s remuneration is their overall compensation. In contrast, most of an employee’s compensation comes from equity in the top levels.

Set up a company-wide career pathing framework in just a few clicks with Deel Engage

Anyone who has ever attempted to create a career framework from scratch knows what a massive task it is. Moreover, as industries and technologies continuously evolve, so do competency needs. As a result, your current skills frameworks may be obsolete in no time.

Deel Engage will help you accelerate this process and integrate career frameworks with other critical HR processes. Our systeEngage’ss you to:

• Define the career progression framework in your organization—differentiate between IC or leadership tracks or combine both
• Define the skills, knowledge, and expertise required for each job level
• With Deel Engage’s AI assistant, you’ll have accurate, tailored competency models and role descriptions with a few clicks
• Create and automatically assign training courses for each specific job level
• Assess employee performance at their current levels and encourage them to reflect on what is missing for advancing their careers
• Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free

Book a demo to see how our solutions will help you define comprehensive career progression frameworks that build a high-performance workforce.