A new career path to empower you to grow as a “Specialist”
Hello! My name is Moeko Tanaka, and I am the HR Manager at Pretia Technologies (not known internally, but known as Moeyan).
Pretia has decided to introduce a new career path system starting in 2023! Specifically, Specialists can be promoted to grade L8 or higher (our system has been graded from L1 to L12 as below screenshot). A member has been promoted to specialists immediately after the introduction of this system.
To begin with, Pretia is a company with many experts.
About 60% of Pretia's team is composed of foreign nationals, and half of them are engineers as of January 2023. Furthermore, there are 17 different nationalities, including Japanese! We are a company with strong nationality diversity.
Another organizational characteristic of Pretia is the existence of an R&D team. This team consists of many experts in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, and their mission is to focus on research and development as experts and to give feedback to the platform (PhD holders were also enrolled).
At Pretia, which has a wide range of business areas, the expertise of the engineer members is diverse, and for a scale of 30 people, there are really various types of engineers, such as Unity 3D engineers who are indispensable in AR development, front-end engineers, application engineers, and platform engineers. We have a team of professional engineers.
“Do I have to be a ‘manager’ to get promoted?”
Pretia's evaluation system is based on 12 levels, where a higher grade = promotion. Based on the idea of "remaining an organization that can leave innovation in society," each grade is defined in detail.
Pretia conducts an evaluation once every six months. At the time of evaluation, members at the manager level and above discuss whether members who want to be promoted are really consistently demonstrating the definition of the grade.
One day last year, during the appraisal period, one of the managers consulted the company, saying, "I want to promote this member, but I can't promote him because he doesn't seem to want to do people management."
Since he was a member who had contributed from the technical side for a long time, this consultation was quite critical, and we had a long discussion within the company.
The reason why we didn't create a precedent for promotion through the Specialist route is that when we separate the management and specialist positions, the engineers are all people who want to improve their expertise and don't want to manage it.
However, as is the case with sports, the strengths of "supervision = manager" and "athlete = player, specialist" are different. Of course, there must be some members who achieve results through playing rather than managing. At Pretia, managers are considered to be one of the roles, but if that is the case, we should also support members who create careers in which their own expertise can become a role model within the company and leave an impact on society. We have come to a conclusion.
In addition, there was a lot of discussion, consideration in defining career paths within the company, and although there was discussion a little while ago, it is also true that at that time I did not have the decision-making strength to change it.
It was enforced at this timing because of the following background.
1. Each team has a member who wants to be a manager and is actually qualified for the position.
2. Since there is a VP of Engineering who trains managers, we can expect continuous production of managers.
With the above changes, we were able to prepare well even if there were people who would concentrate on specialists, and the decision was made to introduce this system.
Introduction to the "Manager" and "Specialist" career path system.
After much discussion, we finally decided to revise the grade system to separate the "Manager" and "Specialist" categories so that career paths can be chosen. We also had detailed discussions with our managers about how to build these two careers.
*Currently introduced only for engineers and designers.
For example, the definitions of "Manager" and "Specialist" in the L8 grade differ as follows.
- Manager; Give effective advices to members' career paths/growths
- Staff; Identify fundamental technical issues in the team and solve those with the team
By separating Manager and Specialist, the title designation was also changed.
We've had a lot of discussion about what kind of things we expect from our company leaders, and I think we've got a good definition, especially from the managers!
A member was actually promoted as a "Specialist"!
The implementation will start this year, but we already have a member promoted to a Specialist! I think that the sense of speed in applying it immediately after making it is unique to Startup/Pretia.
We will follow up and measure whether or not we think this has expanded the careers of our members!
Would you like to work at Pretia?
Pretia, we're growing! If you're at all interested, let's talk!
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