Career Path, a shared framework for evaluating design skills

Why calibration is the step that holds everything else

The most precise Career Path in the world does not hold if managers are not aligned on what the levels mean. A skill rated 3 by one manager and 1 by another, for two similar profiles, is the death of the framework. Nobody trusts it anymore, and the grid becomes a piece of paper that circulates without anchoring the conversation.

The calibration phase is the least visible, the most laborious, and the one that produces the most value over time. It happens as a group, manager by manager, taking real cases and confronting the evaluations. It reveals the deep disagreements about what constitutes a design skill (and about what does not), well before the grid reaches the designers’ hands.

Anecdote, the test that saved the grid

During the first cycle, a test rating on just two sub-skills revealed significant gaps in understanding between managers. Not disagreements about people’s performance, but about the very meaning of the labels. Without that test phase, the grid would have shipped with a structural flaw, and calibration would have been done on the wrong basis.

The lesson: a small-scale test reveals more structural problems than an hour of meetings about the framework. The iterative method applies to writing a career grid as much as to building a feature.

What the framework must not carry

A useful Career Path stays centered on observable skills. Three things must stay out of it:

• Evaluating emotional or personal posture, which belongs to the 1:1 discussion and to coaching, not to the grid.
• Individual business expectations (quarterly objectives, specific KPIs), which have their own frame and should not be confused with long-term growth.
• ‘You should be more like X’ feedback, which is a manager’s projection, not a skill. What counts is what the person can do and is learning to do, not who they resemble.

The framework is a growth tool, not a comparison tool.