Add clarity around completion of competencies and promotions

[rowanmanning]

This adds some clarity across the Engineering Progression website on:

• Whether an engineer needs to be meeting all of the competencies
• How the competencies relate to promotions

This is based on mine and the Working Group's understanding of the progression framework. Some of this I assumed was documented already, but I was unable to find anything.

On meeting all the competencies

We (in the working group) have understood it like this for a long time. The examples on the How to use the Competencies page do demonstrate the evidence to provide if you can't meet a competency:

The team has not had to hire new engineers in the last year, and so this competency cannot be met

But we were not explicit about this. A new entry on the how to use page and a new frequently asked question have been added to remedy this.

On promotions

So far we've made efforts to avoid conflating promotions with competencies. The site and competencies themselves make no reference to promotions, and this was deliberate. One of our rounds of feedback showed us that people interpreted the competencies as a check-list – "tick these boxes, get a promotion". This is incorrect, and so a year ago we adjusted language (and removed the literal checkboxes from the spreadsheet 🤦 that one was definitely our bad).

I think we went too far by removing references to promotion entirely, and our changes haven't remedied misconceptions about how competencies relate to promotions. This PR adds a new frequently asked question which clarifies how the competencies relate to promotions.

You'll notice that the language is a little vague and doesn't commit to too much. That's because we're not the promotions board, and it's not the job of this website to document how the promotions process works. I hope it still adds clarity.

On why this is one PR instead of two

I think these two points are really tightly linked – in order to talk about competencies being used in promotions I also needed to make sure that we were clear that it's OK to not meet some of them. If one of these items is fine and the other needs more work, I'm happy to break this up to get part of it merged in.

[sjwells]

I think that the competencies provide clear guidance about what it means to be a Senior 1 or a Senior 2. They help people work out what experience they need and what skills they need to develop and they help line managers to realise when people are ready or nearly ready.

They aren't required to all be complete for promotion - because that isn't always possible.

And they aren't enough to guarantee promotion on their own - because feedback is also an important component.

I think this PR matches my understanding and makes things clearer.

[oluoluoxenfree]

I like the changes; is it possible to flag in this copy where someone would go to find out more about the promotion process, or is that left unanswered on purpose?

[rowanmanning]

Hey @oluoluoxenfree, good point. I didn't add a link because I don't think there is a documented process that's permanent – each promotion round I've seen seems to include a new Google doc which outlines the process.

@sjwells I might be wrong here, do we have a standard place for promo round documentation which won't change? (I don't want to have to keep changing a link on the progression website each time there's a round if possible)

[rowanmanning]

I think in the interest of getting this merged before the promotion round, I'm going to do that. It'll help with clarity. @oluoluoxenfree I'm going to chase whether there's a link we can point to, I think ideally there should be.