At Nebulab we firmly believe in career growth as a fundamental part of setting up people for long-term success. We strive to provide a simple and effective framework for everyone to use to progress to their next level.
Using a career framework might seem something overly-complex that takes time, is harder to manage and will simply slow everything down at the end of the day. So a natural question might come to mind… why are we doing this? Here are the reasons why we dedicate so much effort in maintaining all of this:
Fairness: we are a very diverse team of people coming from different part of the world with different cultural backgrounds. The intent of the career framework is to clarify what “good work” looks like and place everyone on the same level.
Identity: we want the career framework to help people understand who works in Nebulab and how they think, act and feel. This works both for new hires and clients as well as anyone who wants to learn how we work.
Progression: nobody likes to work a job that always stays the same. The career framework is meant to help anyone building a fair career inside Nebulab and learn new things regardless of where they start.
Usage Examples
The framework is used by managers and individual contributors in a few scenarios:
when onboarding: to understand what a particular role does at Nebulab, what the team expects from them and how it differs from previous jobs the person might have had in the past
during day-to-day work: to use as a reference to understand duties and responsibilities of such role to the internal and external teams as well as project stakeholders
during 1:1s: to help everyone having meaningful conversations about how they’re doing on a specific project and how to grow and progress in their career
during performance reviews: to understand how well they’re doing on the specific role that they are filling in and to plan their next career goals
Framework Components
The Nebulab Framework is made of a few different components. Each job specialization has a few documents that will act as guidance and help team members to fit inside a role and understand their impact on the team.
The framework should be perceived as a long-term guide more than a “one-size-fits-all” solution; everyone is a different, unique individual and no framework will ever be able to represent it. The framework should be used more as a tool to make informed decisions and discussions around growth and shape of the team.
Every job type in Nebulab should have access to these components:
General principles: a document that takes the content of our Valuesand expands those concepts in the day-to-day life of a Nebulab team member.
Career Handbook (such as Software engineer): a career-specific handbook with a general description of the role and principles that role would follow. There is one handbook for a particular career regardless of seniority (i.e. one handbook for EM, one for Software Engineer, …).
Competency Matrix: a career-and-seniority-specific grid of competencies that frames a team member inside a particular set of skills and promotes forward growth. The matrix is on Lattice and it’s used to write IDPs (Individual Development Plans).
How to use it
Ideally everyone in Nebulab should be aligned with the General Principles, their day to day work should be reflected by the Career Handbook and they should be on track to progress to the next level by using the Competency Matrix.
In case there isn’t the full suite of components for a particular job position it’s generally because the department is small and most growth discussions are handled on a tighter feedback loop through 1:1s.
The General Principles will always be available and applicable to any job type, the Career Handbook should be available if we feel the need to clarify what a particular job would look like, the Competency Matrix will only be available for bigger departments.
Careers at Nebulab
Below you will find all the required components for any given career at Nebulab.