Community Forum – How do you align your technical ladder?

Our organization is in the process of implementing a technical ladder and would appreciate your support in helping us benchmark. We are most concerned that our levels are aligned correctly.

Survey Responses

1. “Other” responses:

• Effectively yes, but we decouple salary and technical ladder as much as possible
• Scope and responsibilities which tie to salary

2. “Other” responses:

• Aligned with line management
• Compensation Survey
• Also include informal benchmarking
• Internal compensation team helps benchmark against peer companies
• There is limited data from our market place on salaries
• We haven’t benchmarked in recent years
• HR uses various methods to benchmark; We must also set this globally in each region

3. “Other” responses:

• Globally
• National and International to address specific county requirements
• We make adjustments on the national and regional levels
• Alignment dictated by Federal GS levels and series
• Global view; advised benchmarking by our internal global compensation team

4. Comments:

• Responsibility, reputation and influence are also significant factors
• Technical ladder levels are set to industry standard roles so that benchmarking data for salary is available.  For example, Design Engineer I, II, III, etc.
• We look at skills, leadership and behaviors. We expect people to grow in depth, and breadth (T-shape). Different levels of competence are required as you progress on the career. In our company, performance is key in order to be eligible for promotion, but not for weighting technical ladder level.
• The criteria all are based on various aspects of value of contributions to the company, and relevant behavior traits.  The other factors are at best indirect/subconscious elements only. Strictly speaking, education and tenure should be completely disregarded in the evaluation, but that information is available to the review board.
• We also think of competencies – our competencies progression enable delivery and increased scope

5. Comments:  

• The weighting is not formal, the ratings above are inferred from observation
• Salaries by level are not advertised, but people know their current level
• Technical Ladder process documentation