Brooklyn Data Co. (a Velir company)

Welcome to Career Development at BDC 👋

🏛️ Learning Philosophy

BDC recognizes that many successful and fulfilling careers are non-linear. While linear careers are typically driven by fixed career preparation and traditional vertical growth (like a step ladder), non-linear careers may begin in one direction, then shift to a different path, sometimes laterally, other times vertically, and in any direction (like a lattice). These shifts typically happen through unexpected opportunities, discoveries, and happy accidents that present new insights about a team member’s professional preferences.

While a clear path to advancement doesn’t typically exist for nonlinear career growth, we have invested heavily in developing our career frameworks (which you can find on Progression) and Skills Matrices. Our goal is to ensure that the nonlinear career trajectory is as stress-free and successful as possible.

Framework Principles

🎨 Professional development at BDC is individualized. This means:

• Development is driven by a team member's strengths, interests, support needs, and opportunistic growth rather than linear training and a “climbing the ladder” approach.
• Pathing is driven by flexibility to enable team members, their managers, and leadership to identify relevant parameters and desired outcomes as the team member's interests and skills evolve through client work, organizational projects, and other engagements.

📖 Career progression at BDC is an open framework, and career accomplishments are publicly celebrated. This looks like:

• Detailed job descriptions, required skills/competencies, and other information to set defined expectations for growth opportunities;
• Access to team members currently holding roles across the organization; and
• Visible announcements that describe a team member’s contributions and achievements in support of the promotion or role change.

🧬 Career frameworks are expected to evolve. This is because:

• Like our industry and the world around us, we are constantly growing, which means we will regularly iterate on how team members can develop their careers here. 
• Managers, ICs, and even prospective team members may challenge assumptions, build on previous discoveries, and suggest better approaches to defining and leveling roles.

✋ You are the primary owner of your career, and BDC is a support partner in your professional development. This means:

• Individuals are responsible for leveraging feedback (to understand where they add value, where they fall short, and how to fill the gaps), being prepared for career conversations with their manager, making plans, and following through on developmental commitments;
• BDC provides on-the-job resources to learn and grow and an annual educational allowance to subsidize external training opportunities; and 
• Managers (in collaboration with other leadership) provide space for ongoing feedback/coaching and can proactively identify client work, stretch assignments, and/or other projects and leverage connections to enable opportunities to facilitate individual growth.

🏆 BDC wants every team member to reach their full potential. This is because:

• Team members who succeed at BDC are those who promote our cultural norms (such as sharing expertise in meetings and pairing with new hires) and values and approach their growth holistically (i.e. developing both technical and human competencies).
• Team members who are most effective at improving their own performance are also more effective at enhancing and leveraging others’ performance.
• Individual and team success directly impacts BDC’s ability to successfully deliver services to our clients and partners.

✨ Promotion Expectations

Promotions at BDC are driven by a mix of behavior and values, in addition to role- or level-specific skills. Notably, we also have developed our frameworks in recognition of the fact that while some team members will want to grow into more challenging individual contributor (IC) roles, others will be more interested to move into people management. This approach is another artifact of our philosophy that growth is individualized here at BDC.

There are, however. universal expectations that hold across the company, regardless of team, role, or level.

To progress from one level to a level above, one must demonstrate (or contribute to):

1. Personal Growth: This looks like investing in your own capabilities to both succeed in your role’s requirements and to continually develop yourself toward reaching your greatest potential (aka Self-Actualization). These include your skills, knowledge, wisdom, habits, behavior, and personal qualities that improve you.
2. Company Growth: This includes activities that benefit the team and support productivity for others, such as mentoring and documentation. This can look like internal actions and behavior that champion company culture, such as celebrating wins and working loudly, too! See also: Organizational Citizenship.
3. External Growth: This looks like developing and supporting long-term growth within and between relationships with individuals and organizations outside of BDC such as partners, clients, prospective team members, and the data community at-large.

With those pieces in mind, we promote based on performance, merit, and the potential a team member has been determined to perform in the future or in a new role. While some variation will exist across teams, these broader expectations hold across the company.

Every team member has access to Progression when they join BDC.

🕸️ Career Frameworks

Role definitions and career pathways have been collaboratively built into the Progression platform. Every team shares a collection of competencies and sub-skills, and each role will have its own mix of skills/competencies (and proficiency levels within them) assigned.

☑️ Check-Ins

Through this platform, individual contributors and their people managers can document development and growth using the check-ins feature. Used in conjunction with formal performance reviews in Culture Amp, the Progression frameworks offer our team members a benchmark for specific skills/competencies connected to their role (or another level, if being considered for promotion, or a different role, if exploring a new position).

🙌 Wins

Team members can also use this space to document and celebrate wins with other team members (which also offer insight into skills-based reflection).