Over one year ago, we introduced two roles in Endava – the Line Manager and the Career Coach. These roles came as a result of our organizational growth and are crucial for our internal Career Development Program. But there’s more to it and let’s see together why we decided to set up these new positions and how do these roles influence the professional growth of our people.
First of all, it’s important to say that our core purpose drives everything we do here at Endava. We exist to create an environment and a culture that breeds success by treating our customers as individuals and by enabling our people to be the best that they can be. Therefore, we are in a continuous search for different ways to make it a reality for our employees and customer base.
As our business and client networks are expanding, our people naturally have many more opportunities to build on their existing knowledge and skills and take up new and stretching assignments. Being a matrix organization with a proven track record of fast growth in many of our locations, we find that creating a coaching culture is one of the ways to support our people in their both personal and professional development. We decided to introduce the role of Career Coach to support employee development and help people understand where they are on their career path, where they want to go and to identify how to get there.
In Endava we strongly believe that each employee is the driver of his/her career. The Career Development Discussions are the primary tool of a person’s further growth, regarding their technical and soft skills. Each employee agrees with his/her Career coach on the dynamic of those meetings and they partner in thought-provoking conversations about career aspirations, learning opportunities, challenges, support and then agree on action plans and timelines. Each employee in Endava has a Career Coach, and each Career Coach is specialized in different directions: soft skills, technical skills, a particular programming language, stakeholder management, leadership, and so on. Our employees can choose different Career Coaches according to their professional needs and aspirations of the moment, so their careers will develop according to their plans.
We also created another leadership role the Line Manager. This person works as a “liberating leader,” with responsibilities around leading highly engaged, high performing teams. Our definition of a high performing team is a trusted team that works in a safe environment, where people got each other’s backs by encouraging honest feedback and hold each other accountable. The final purpose of a high performing team is to focus on results and achieving a collective goal while having the group commitment. We are proud of the fact that we have Line Managers across the business that know how to access the power of the team and enable a feedback culture.
Of course, our Career Development Program does not refer only to the key persons and/or our leaders but is being designed specifically for each of our employees with the joined efforts of the Line Manager, the Career Coach and the employee. We believe that we need a continuous investment around the individual capability of each employee. These two roles complement each other and through collaboration leveraging the capability of all our people and the performance of our teams, as we continue to build upon technical excellence and provide world-class delivery to our clients.
To support and make the Career Development program the most efficient for each individual, we designed and implemented an internal tool called Career Development System. This tool is a personalized digital portal that provides clear and transparent information about career maps, career opportunities based on seniority and professional experience. Also, the system enables providing and requesting structured feedback throughout the organization.
We are convinced that setting up a culture of feedback, knowledge sharing and high performance is critical to creating an environment and a culture that breeds success. And we are proof that being a people-oriented company enabled us to reach 5.182 employees, located in offices in North America and Western Europe and delivery centers in Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Colombia.
The future sure looks bright for, and we are excited to see what’s next!
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