Professional Development Ladder Support

Get all the help you need to succeed with the PDL

Jump start your success

Well-defined career paths help increase staff capability, improve project outcomes and retain employees. However, implementing career paths effectively can be overwhelmingly complex.

Which career paths should be included? How detailed should the guidance be? How much customization is appropriate for your business? How do you account for your business’s unique attributes?

Thankfully, you don’t need to start from scratch, or implement your career path plan alone.

Customization and Preparation Services

Construx guides your staff as they customize details of the PDM’s Knowledge Areas, including adding new knowledge areas relevant to your business, and customizing the reading, training, and work activities specific to your environment.

Construx guides your staff as they create customized career paths using the PDM. Construx then completes a detailed review of the career paths and provides feedback.

Construx helps with integrating the PDL into your HR processes, including aligning PDL levels with your organization’s grade levels and defining the relationship between PDL career development work and career pathing within your company.

Construx works with you to develop agreed-upon proficiency standards and align your organization around those standards. These are used to support staff assessments and career planning.

Construx helps your organization build an inventory of skills using the PDL’s defined Capability Levels and Knowledge Areas to establish a skills inventory, which is used for gap analysis and capacity planning during the sustaining phase.

Construx trains managers and mentors throughout the organization on how to use the PDL as part of planning and supporting career development and in performance management review.

Customization work begins in workshops that help you tailor the Professional Development Ladder to your exact needs

Rollout and Sustaining Services

Professional Development Plans provide a mechanism to plan, track, and document each professional’s progress along their career path. Construx supports creation of the initial set of PDPs through manager training and PDP reviews.

Each staff member creates a Professional Development Snapshot (PDS) of their current capabilities, which is used to support the PDPs as well as an organization skills inventory.

Construx’s ever-growing catalog of online courses is coordinated with PDL work to provide highly relevant, highly authoritative, leading-edge training in support of your staff’s career development.

Construx continues to review samples of PDPs and the associated Professional Development Snapshots within them and provide feedback and guidance.

Construx helps your organization update your skills inventory and use that as a basis for identifying future skills needs. We then guide you through planning to close skills gaps by feeding all that information back into career planning and mentoring sessions.

Construx provides additional guidance and feedback to managers and mentors as the PDL is adopted and used throughout the organization.

Construx provides updates to recommended reading, training, and directed work experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

At Construx we believe every software project can be successful. Led by Code Complete author, Steve McConnell, our team is comprised of professionals who are software experts first, software trainers and consultants second. Our mission is to make your software teams more effective.

We know what lessons individuals and organizations need to learn in order to be more effective, and our career pathing offers the most comprehensive program available to developers and their organizations.

Organizations that provide career pathing are better able to retain technical staff, are aware of any knowledge gaps in their software organization and are capable of filling those gaps. This all leads to a more effective software organization overall.

Wanting to learn more is a fundamental trait of technical staff. Our Professional Development Ladder gives a clear path for individual success. Instead of learning lessons the hard way and developing your own curriculum, we’ve developed our ladder to maximize individuals’ time spent learning, so they can truly master their craft the same way that those in traditional vocations do.

The content is designed to be consumed over the course of six to ten years to reach mastery in any given path. However, the benefits of implementing a Professional Development Ladder will be noticeable within the first few months.

Yes. To get the full benefits of the PDL, we suggest an implementation workshop to customize the PDL to fit your organization’s needs.

Our experience says, absolutely. Lacking opportunities to grow professionally, or not having clear career pathing, leads to stagnation and high turnover. Implementing a PDL at your organization shores up a weak spot in company culture.

Ready to dive in?

We can help you tailor a program that meets your company’s needs.

Learn more about how we can lead you to success and contact us.