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While I am not familiar specifically with Construx, I have encountered
the concept elsewhere. As I understand the general principle, a company
that adopts this approach basically considers a total of two ladders.
One corresponds to the traditional advancement scheme for managers: the
more people and layers who report to you, the more you get paid. The
other ladder is for people whose ambitions are not to manage more and
more _people_ but rather to take on responsibility for more and more
valuable _things_. This may entail managing complex projects and leading
workgroups, but the focus is on accomplishing the work, not on
manipulating, er, managing the people doing the work.
In a company that has only a single ladder, people who don't want to be
managers get frustrated because they do not get recognized or
compensated for their professional advancement. Their only choice if
they want a promotion is to get Peter Principled into a job they don't
want and probably can't do very well. That's why a system with two
parallel ladders is such a compelling idea. The formal setup means that
at each rung of the management ladder there is a corresponding rung on
the professional/technical ladder, with a comparable compensation package.
I think that in most implementations, people climb the
professional/technical ladder more on the basis of the value of the
projects they take on than on the specifics of course hours or degrees,
although the latter may affect the former, to be sure. (That is, the
company is not going to hand over a multi-million-dollar laboratory to
someone with an associate's degree from a community college and no
experience; but they might hand it over to a PhD who has been working
for a year or two.)
I suppose there may be some organizations where people are paid based on
the degree they hold irrespective of the work they do, but I can't
imagine that's a successful strategy in the long run.
As applied to tech writing, I think what you should propose is that the
ladder be tied to size and complexity of projects the person handles
rather than credentials as such.
Dick
Roger Shuttleworth wrote:
Hello All
I wonder if anyone can point me to resources that deal with technical
writer career/professional development. My company (a software company)
is investigating the "ladder" system advocated by Construx. In this
system an employee moves up the ladder to different levels of knowledge
and experience by achieving measurable goals (such as courses, books,
responsibilities, etc.). Each level carries its own compensation
package. This system is frequently applied to programmers, but does
anyone know of anything similar in the technical writing field? Or know
of lists of measurable goals or steps that would apply to technical
writing?
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