How we acknowledge ability
At Inviqa we do diverse work that requires diverse skills. People are not the same and are rarely interchangeable on projects. We celebrate this diversity and have a number of ways for you to show what you are good at, and let the rest of the company know what projects you will be suited to working on.
To avoid pigeon-holeing anyone to a specific platform or language, we are all Software Engineers at Inviqa.
We use Inviqa Me to manage our professional development. It has great features such as allowing you to set goals and record your achievements as well as a mechanism to get regular feedback on your progress.
The 2 elements within Inviqa Me that allow showing your breadth and depth of knowledge are expertise and skills:
Expertise
Expertise in Inviqa Me describes the specific platforms, languages, frameworks, methodologies, tools (and more) that you work with.
It allows you set your proficiency in the above according to the Dreyfus scale in addition to allowing you to express your desire to learn or do more (or less) of.
Maintaining your Expertise helps ensure you are best-placed to get opportunities to be involved in more projects that interest you. It is also important for helping Inviqa understand the bigger picture of where our skillsets are as a group.
Unlike Skills, Expertise is intentionally specific and niche. It does not form part of any formal assessment, but using this system will help you get project opportunities that you are interested in and that you might need to gain experience implied by some Skills.
Skills
Skills are not specific to any programming language or platform, and range from technical knowledge through to professional and people skills. They represent what you need to succeed at Inviqa.
You will be assessed against these skills as you progress and will need to gather feedback from your colleagues to support your growth (see the progression overview for ways of formally acknowledging your progression and gaining a promotion).
Our Engineering skills are bespoke for Inviqa but were inspired in part by the SFIA framework.
They are divided up into 5 categories; Core Technical, Focused Technical, People, Process & Methodology, Professional. You are expected to satisfy the requirements of all skills defined for your role, with the exception of the Focused Technical category from which you choose a subset of the skills as electives (see the understanding the framework for more detail).
In the current assessment process it is up to you to provide evidence covering a skill's expectations towards the level applied for.