Thian-Peng Ter - Taking Charge of Your Architecture Career

Taking Charge of Your Architecture Career

February 11, 2019

Architects can sometimes feel lost in their career — not knowing what to do next, frustrated and unable to make progress. They start seeking better opportunities elsewhere, hoping that someone could offer them a level of development within their work environment. They want to grow professionally, and they also want to know their career paths. In this article, I will describe a toolkit that you can use for developing your career path as an architect and then discuss it with your manager, a mentor, or your trusted peer.

Why You Should Develop A Career Path

Like most people, architects wait for their managers to come to them and offer up new jobs. They get frustrated when they see others rewarded before them. While good managers should promote their architects, the architects should also let their managers know what they want to do first — their career path.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

When you take charge of your career path, you will find out about different job options, including higher level positions, lateral moves, or entirely new roles. You are more likely to stay at your organization and see the value you are adding to the company.

Integrating Competencies to Your Career Path

A career path is an excellent way to develop your competencies. Speaking of competency, it is more than just a skill. A skill concerns about a specific proficiency in some area of expertise, for example, cloud-native application development. An essential skill in this area would be the ability to develop applications in a cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. However, the ability to understand an application development problem and create an elegant and efficient solution using that cloud environment is a competency.

Competencies focus on the ability to produce certain outcomes through the application of various skills, and the synthesis of knowledge, understanding and other psychological traits. — Cognology

With a set of competencies that are important to you, you can discuss the different job options with your manager. Instead of a traditional ladder career path that is hierarchical and uni-directional, you will explore different job options, including those from other departments. For example, you may consider making a lateral move to Product Management to build up your competency in Customer Focus. This approach is known as Career Lattice.

Identifying Your Competencies

An architect needs not only technical competencies but business and behavioural competencies (soft skills) to be effective. For example, Figure 1 shows the top competencies for the two roles outlined by Gartner: Lead Architect and Technical Architect. The lead architect is responsible for the architecture function, whereas the technical architect is responsible for conducting R&D projects to test new techniques and technologies.

The competency level required for each role varies, some are basic, and some need extensive expertise. For example, the lead architect will benefit from a high level of competence in "influencing and persuading" whereas a technical architect will be able to get by with less expertise in this area. So it is unrealistic to expect an architect to have all competencies at the "coach" level.

Figure 1: Competencies for different architects (source: Gartner)

Addressing Competency Gaps

Now that you have a list of competencies, you can then rate your abilities and also ask your peers and manager to give you feedback. This process is known as the 360-degree assessment. After aggregating their feedback, you will have a realistic picture of your abilities, which then enables you to conduct a gap analysis, as shown below.

Figure 2: Competencies with a value less than zero indicate your strengths, whereas those with a value greater than zero indicate your areas of improvement.

During the gap analysis, you can compare your competencies with those in your current job. You can also compare them with those in another role to see what gaps you need to close to be promoted or make a lateral move.

After identifying those gaps, you will then create a personal development plan to help you improve those competencies, e.g. attending training sessions or working with another architect who is already competent in that area.

Managing Competency Assessment

Making a competency assessment is like setting your annual budget for spending. It is best to assess it every year and then review it every quarter to understand what your gaps are. You then adjust your plan accordingly so that you are on track with your career path.

If you are interested in trying out a competency assessment toolkit, feel free to make a copy of this Google Sheet.