RockContent creates innovative marketing products and services, designed to build content experiences at scale. Founded in Brazil, RockContent is now a global leader in content marketing, with offices in four countries and six locations worldwide, 2,000 customers, and about 500 employees.

Paulo Gontijo, Director of Engineering at RockContent, will tell why developing the skills of the product and engineering teams inside the company are crucial parts of RockContent talent management strategy.

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Brazilian talent tech market

The competition in the tech talent market is growing. And many tech companies are experiencing serious difficulties in finding the right people for their teams and retaining top tech talent.

As a leader in the market, we want to stay competitive. That’s why we’re investing in training, feedback, and tools that help “Rockers” grow. This is one of our major goals.

Tech companies in Brazil and worldwide start prioritizing people growth. And in RockContent, we work hard to retain and engage our Engineers, PDs, PMs and Agilists. So, everything we can do to help them grow and develop their skills is good for them and for RockContent as well.

The goal: help “Rockers” evolve

To manage tech talent and develop the skills of the team we needed a tool that will help us build clear career paths to evolve.

That’s where Vectorly came in handy. It allowed us to create a transparent framework for helping our team to evolve. With skills matrices, skill reviews, career path templates it helped the team evolve in their careers by demonstrating through a mapping of technical skills which efforts should be prioritized.

Implementation of Vectorly

We decided to start with the Product and the Engineering teams and switch them to Vectorly. And the first thing we needed to do is present the service to team members.

We have kickoff meetings every month with the whole Product and Engineering team: PMs, PDs, Devs, SREs, Agile Coaches, and during one of these meetings, we introduced Vectorly.

We received positive feedback only and met no resistance. So we started to use the service right away.

The RockContent approach to skill matrices & building career paths

For RockContent, the initial goal of creating skill matrices for different roles was to help the team develop technical skills and build tech career paths.

Vectorly has successfully covered our needs and helped us to meet this goal. The process of building a career ladder in Vectorly is fully automated and is held in 4 simple steps:

Step 1. Create a list of skills

At this stage, a list of skills is formed that are necessary for a particular role. The manager can create their own list, or use ready-made skill matrix templates and customize them to the needs of their team.

Step 2: Set career path grades (levels)

Next, a career path is formed. It contains job levels (or job grades) and their description - what skills are required to take a certain position or skip to the next level.

Depending on the size of the company, the career path may look different depending on the size and the needs of the team. It can have one track or two tracks (managerial and IC).

Step 3: Mapping skills to grades

In order to set relevant requirements for job levels in your team, you need to assign employees to their current grades and run a skill review. After doing this, you’ll get an understanding of the real level of skills of your teammates of different grades, and based on these analytics, set the requirements for job levels on a career path.

Step 4: 1:1 to build PDP

Once you have determined the current level of skills of the team members and set the requirements for grades, the manager holds a 1-on-1 meeting during which he or she builds a growth plan that includes learning activities and work tasks for the development of focus skills.

One of the main advantages of Vectorly is that you can build your own career path and skills matrix, using a ready-made template and customize it to the needs of your company. We could say that from 50% to 70% remains in the Rock’s personalized skill matrices.

How RockContent uses reviews

Up to now, we use Mesh as our main performance review tool to assess RockContent values and behaviors. Also, we have added Vectorly to perform skill assessments of our Product and Engineering teams.

Read: A Step-by-Step Guide to Software Engineering Performance Review [Skill Matrix Templates]

When making decisions and assessing the team’s performance we take into account multiple factors.

Technical assessment is one of the criteria evaluated in the performance analysis process, consisting of the evaluation of soft skills and the delivered results. Thus, the technical analysis cannot be considered in isolation as a criterion for progression or promotion.

The benefits of using Vectorly

• Vectorly helped us build a transparent career progression to develop technical skills and grow employees professionally.
• The service covers the needs of RockContent’s Product and Engineering teams as it offers an automated assessment and development of technical skills.
• Vectorly skills and career templates are integrated with the service and allow customization depending on the size and the needs of the team.