A Comprehensive Tech Skills Information Architecture for New Grads and Career Changers
Written by Morgan Denner, Executive Director for Tech Fleet
It’s been five years since Tech Fleet’s mission started in 2020. Tech still has a lot of barriers today.
Companies want experience and key industry skills that school can’t teach. The industry evolves at a faster pace than training programs. New graduates and career changers must keep up.
In 2024, Tech Fleet started exploring the key factors that it takes to succeed in tech-related roles. Read the introduction to this work here.
This article introduces the next evolution to career training: a Tech Skills Information Architecture framework for the world to utilize.
The framework is a first-of-its-kind information layer for tech training infrastructure.
In this article, we introduce the vision, problems, value, and key uses of the framework.
Vision
This information layer offers a common language in technology career success. With it, trainees can understand how far they have come and how much they’ll have to train for a career they love. The framework can provide a foundation to measure readiness, progress, and success. More data will be added as the industry evolves.
The Problems This Solve
Knowledge about what tech-related skills to build, and how to build them, seems like a deep mystery.
- Different people have a different opinions about necessary tech career skills to hold.
- Startup, agency, and in-house company skill expectations vary based on what they define.
- Different company job titles have different daily expectations.
- Buzzwords and jargon create misunderstandings about what skills and deliverables to practice.
- Schools and training programs teach basic hard skills. Companies expect team-focused soft skills.
- Skills, tasks, tools, deliverables, and experience relate to each other in complicated ways.
Key Value for Trainees
This framework brings value for people training in the following ways:
- It concretely explains skills, activities, deliverables, methods, and specializations involved in tech-related jobs.
- It breaks down the differences between skills for startups, agencies, and in-house companies.
- It helps trainees communicate skills as they build experience.
- It helps trainees tell the story about skills gained in previous work experience.
- It helps trainees make informed decisions about professional development gaps.
Key Value for Teams
This framework brings value for teams in the following ways:
- It helps teams standardize Agile Product Operations.
- It helps teams plan proper work outcomes.
- It helps employers make informed decisions about candidate skills.
- It provides a system to measure job readiness, progress, and success.
Key Value for Coaches and Teachers
This framework brings value for coaches and teachers in the following ways:
- It explains key concepts through a shared language.
- It provides components of education curriculum that’s industry-focused.
- It can help educators build lessons around cross-functional team collaboration.
Background
An information architecture (in this case, an Ontology) portrays objects and their relationship to each other.
This information architecture focuses on the convoluted subject of “Agile product and service development”.
Here are the objects described in the framework:
- Company types
- Hard skills
- Soft skills
- Work tasks
- Tools
- Deliverables
- Methodologies
- Workshops
- Product milestones
- Specializations
- Commitments
- Job titles
Objects have a unique relationship to each other. When looking at each, one can build understanding about those relationships.
There are 12 objects we’ve created in this framework. Each object has examples, and each has a relationship to other objects.
Example
Here’s an example of the information architecture, showing the relationship between project milestones and all other Tech Skills objects:
Here’s the file showing the information architecture of this framework:
A Shared Language of Tech Skills and Experience
Finally, new graduates and career changers can understand exactly what’s expected. Finally, we can all speak the same language about aspects of technology careers and Agile development.
For Example
It’s very common for jobs and roles and tasks to be conflated. One job can require many roles. Job titles often use the same name as roles. Every company defines their own requirements for what job titles require. No wonder people get confused!
With the framework’s shared language, we can discuss how there are “many roles per job title”. We can speak to the variance people see in job expectations. We can build proper expectations about the work people agree to when they train on teams.
Here’s a dashboard showcasing the skills, tools, tasks, deliverables, and specializations for specific tech commitments:
Here’s some training that shows the difference between job titles and commitments:
Agile Team Building for Beginners
Agile has unique challenges for those who are new. Teammates don’t know where to start, and don’t know whether they’re doing it right. They won’t know how to break a Waterfall mindset if not coached.
Doing this at scale on project training in Tech Fleet has proved challenging. Teams who have people with experience can be guided, and others fall back to the way they have been trained in Waterfall.
The Tech Skills Framework provides ways to build training that helps beginners speak the language of Agile and know how to properly operate.
For example
RACI charts are a common Agile team deliverable, but they are often confusing for people doing work for the first time on Agile teams.
Using the Tech Skills Framework, teams use a workshop template to build their own RACI chart and understand how cross-functional teams work.
Agile Product Development Clarity
Ask five different product managers and they may give you five different answers about the steps to launch products to market. The struggle is real for people training in Agile Product development. Classroom theory can easily fall apart when faced with real-world situations on teams.
The Tech Skills Framework provides a relationship between milestones, deliverables, and work tasks. This helps teams understand everything they should be doing, and when, towards launching MVP and MMP products.
We’ve started with basic tech functions and will add more over time.
Example
Here’s a chart and workshop template showing how Tech Fleet builds expectations with UX designers, UX researchers, and other trainees in how products get launched with Agile. Each milestone, a result of progress, depicts completion of deliverables. Each deliverable requires tasks to complete. Each task requires skills.
Here’s an example showing the different work deliverables required to launch MVP and MMP:
Helping Trainees Explore Possibilities
Trainees come from all walks of life. Some industries have more translatable hard skills and soft skills than others. The clarity about this is in the heads of career coaches and other experts who all have different opinions.
Now, since the hard skills and soft skills for key job functions are outlined, we can compare skills people may have gained from previous careers to the skills they need in a desired career. We can help them develop a training baseline, and a focused training path forward.
This can guide people in ways that have been hard to access for some trainees.
Example
Here’s a dashboard showing different industries and the translatable skill sets that people may carry into tech from those industries:
Effective Agile Project Management
Since school teaches basic hard skills, there’s a large gap when doing Agile team operations. Teammates who are new to tech often don’t know how to be a cross-functional team. People get confused understanding the why, what, when, and how.
The framework’s foundations of Agile product development helps new teams build comprehensive project planning. They can outline goals, outcomes, and deliverables necessary for project work even before they begin. This helps newcomers be guided in a scaled way, without “experts” in the room.
Example
Here’s a project plan workshop template showing how teams get trained to plan project goals, outcomes, and deliverables.
Where We Go from Here
- We’re going to keep building cross-functional team workshop templates to help newcomers.
- We’re going to build systems based on this framework for trainees to measure skill levels and experience levels.
- We’re going to work with key players in the industry to scale this framework and ensure its success as the industry continues to change.
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