Can you walk me through the process of creating a career development plan for a team member? How do you ensure it is aligned with both their individual goals and the needs of the team/company?

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Situation: I had a software engineer from my broader team who wanted to grow as
a Machine Learning Engineer. This person was transitioned to my team based on
his interest.

Task: My task was to ensure that this software engineer grows in his role as a
machine learning engineer and becomes successful while ensuring that the work he
is doing aligns with the company's goals.

Actions: Machine learning and AI were areas of high investment for my company.
So his individual goals already aligned with the company's goals. I first set up
a 1:1 with the new engineer and understood his skills and gaps. He already had
taken some ML courses online and had some theoretical knowledge of different
concepts like traditional ML algorithms, metrics for evaluation etc. I first
identified a user story for the engineer to work on. This story was both
impactful at the same time it was slightly less complicated compared to some of
the transformer based GenAI solutions that some of the other engineers were
working on. I wanted to make sure that the team member makes incremental
progress towards their final goal. This project also had a chance of
collaboration with other ML scientists working on other area in the company. I
setup appropriate goals to track for the quarter and had regular follow up
sessions to make sure he was on track. I gave him a chance to showcase his work
through show n tell sessions. I made sure exactly what was expected out of the
feature and also established metrics to evaluate like the false positive rate
etc.

Result: Through all of these steps the team member completed the task on time
and the feature was delivered to our customer and it also got great feedback and
good customer satisfaction scores.

Can you walk me through the process of creating a career development plan for a team member? How do you ensure it is aligned with both their individual goals and the needs of the team/company?

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