In this video, we will discuss career paths and job roles.

So, what exactly is a job role? A job role is like a job title. Once the members in your organization have a job role, you can assign training based on that job role.

To get the most benefit from job roles, you can set them up as stages of a career path like the one we're looking at here. So Junior, Mid, and Senior Front-End Engineers are job roles or stages in the career path called Front-End Engineer. In this career path, we indicate the level of proficiency that members with each job role need in essential skills.

Configuring this information enables you to automate training with programs within each job role. You assign skill-based training programs like we see here.

These types of programs assign training on the smart skills to each team member with this job role, add the difficulty levels appropriate to each team member, symbolized here by the stars.

Now you can create job roles on the fly when you create a career path, which we will show you later, but you can also import job roles. To do so, we start from the admin screen and click on Careers and select Job roles. To import a job role, we could click on the Import job roles button on the top right and the file that's required to upload a job role is CSV. You can download our template by clicking on the download our template button here. But the template looks like this, so simply two columns named e-mail and job title. It could also be more than one member and more than one job title, and you could upload them all in bulk. So that is how job roles are related to career paths.

A career path is a representation of how a team member progresses through their career at your company. It can contain one or more job roles for team members to move through as they develop, as well as a list of skill, team members, and that career path need. When you open up a career path, you see a matrix of the job roles in the order you expect the person to progress through them, and the smart skills that are essential for team members on that career path.

At each point of the matrix, you see a number of stars, 0 through 3. The stars indicate how well the team member with this job role should score on that smart skill. Zero stars means that skill is not applicable for this job role. One star means a member with this job role should have a basic level ability in the skill. Two stars means a member with this job role should have intermediate level of ability in that skill. And three stars is a member with this job role that should have advanced level ability in that particular skill.

So how do we create a career path? From the admin view, we will look for the Career section here on the left and click on Career paths. From this page, we'll click on Create a career path here on the top right. And for this example, we'll use a template like AWS Solutions Architect. Doing so allows you to customize or tweak the skill levels applicable to job roles.

So, let's go ahead and click on Customize template and we'll give this a name like “Custom AWS Solutions Architect”. So, if we look at the matrix here - so maybe we want our Mid-Level AWS Solution Architect to be more advanced in designing for disaster recovery. So, we'll go ahead and add a star here. And maybe we decided that designing storage solutions does not require the highest level of expertise for our Senior Solutions Architect. So, we'll go ahead and remove a star here. And from here, we could just click on the Save button here on the top right.

So, as you saw, a career path could have multiple job roles assigned to them. You could think of them as levels or different variations.

In the context of levels, you can have a career path like we see here called Front-End Engineer, but have a Junior, Mid, and Senior to signify seniority or expertise level.

In the context of variation within the same career path, you can have Cloud Engineers in your company that are more AWS focused and others that are Azure focused. So, you can have a career path called Cloud Engineer but have a job role called Cloud Engineer AWS Focus and another one called Cloud Engineer Azure Focus. And as we see here, we assigned three stars to all AWS related content to the job role called Cloud Engineer AWS Focus and one star for the Azure content since they work with Azure very little. Same for the Cloud Engineer, Azure focused three star for all Azure related content and one star for AWS content.

So, we saw that there are built in career paths available, and we saw that we can customize an existing career path. To create a custom career path, we will start from the admin view and look for the Career section here on the left and select Career paths. From here we will look for the Create a career path button here on the top right. And this time we'll select New career path.

We'll give this path a name, something like “Marketing Specialist”. We'll leave the description blank for now. And for skills, I will select some marketing skills that I think are relevant for the marketing specialist path. So, we'll select a couple skills here, maybe a couple more.

All right, so now we can assign job roles to this career path. If one does not exist, no worries because you could create them right on the fly, so I'll create one called “Marketing Specialist Level 1” and click on the Create button here. Add another one called “Marketing Specialist Level 2”, and one final one called “Marketing Specialist Level 3”.

So now that we have the matrix, we can determine the level of skill we want our job roles to attain as they progress through this career path. So, we're going to do it according to their names. So, for Marketing Specialist Level 1, we'll do one star for each skill, two star for the Level 2 skill, and three stars for the Level 3 skill. And from here, we simply click on Save.

Now, we know that job roles are very specific to organizations. Take a look at a standard description for a Cloud Engineer role here on the left.

Sure, it describes things like designing modular cloud-based systems and identifying infrastructure vulnerabilities and deployment issues. But which cloud based systems and infrastructures are relevant to your company?

So, if we look at the description on the right, we can make it specific. So, design and deploy AWS cloud-based systems and identify and analyze Azure infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Using QA's job roles and career paths, you can create a path specific to your organization's needs using the smart skills like we see here on the left. We can also determine the level of expertise we want our Cloud Engineer to possess. So maybe GCP operations are not as important, so we'll assign it one star. But monitoring and alerting with Azure is crucial, so we assigned it three stars. We could also assign specific training content based on the job description like we see here on the right.

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