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      2. Six-week rollout
      3. Building

      Creating a framework template

      This article is for Project Leads.

      Now that your framework parameters are in place, it’s time to crack on with your build. But how do you enforce those parameters in practice?

      With Progression, it’s easy to set guardrails that’ll help teams successfully build in the app.

      When you first embark on your build, you can create a framework template and core skills to keep content consistent and targeted across your organisation.

      Let’s take a closer look at these features.

      Templates

      Set yourself up for scale right from the start with a framework template. Templates act as a foundation from which HRBPs and Function Leads can build. They’re great because they:

      • Help teams get up and running faster with an inspiring, relevant and standardised starting point

      • Specify required core skills for teams that can’t be edited or removed to help drive consistency across your organisation

      • Outline a shared methodology or starter pattern for defining tracks and positions

      • Reduce the margin for error and time wasted building the wrong thing

      • Drive consistency across frameworks, enabling employees to easily compare positions across your organisation

      • Help you enforce the framework parameters set in the planning phase, such as category structure and naming conventions.

      We always recommend starting your build with a template, outlining your organisation’s position naming convention, tracks, categories and required core skills, and locking any content you don’t want modified.

      Within the template, you also have the option to set per-skill and per-category edit controls. As standard, both admins and editors are able to edit a skill, and create a new ‘child’ variant of a core skill, but you can choose to ‘lock’ a skill, making it editable by admins only and preventing variants being created.

      Core skills are the skills everyone in your organisation is required to have, no matter their team, track or position. Not only useful for driving consistency across frameworks, core skills can also enable internal mobility by creating a more level playing field across positions.

      We recommend mirroring core skills to your organisation’s values. Here’s why:

      • Organisation values can be a great jumping off point for core skills

      • It can help connect values to everyday work

      • Your organisation’s values should feel familiar to everyone — they may have even been involved in their creation — so they’re likely to feel more engaging than generic transferable skills.

      Remember, it’s important to limit the total number of skills in a position to 12. Where you have too many values to dedicate a skill each, consider incorporating your values into other transferable skills and making these your core skills. For example, your value might be ‘Thinking outside the box’, so in the Communication skill you might include this example; ‘You come up with new ways to communicate information and are always thinking outside the box.’

      If you’d prefer not to use your organisation’s values as the foundation for your core skills (for example if you already have a set of transferable, ‘common sense’ or required skills defined at org level, or your values aren’t appropriate because they don’t have growth levels) that’s absolutely fine. But be sure to include some core skills in your framework template to drive consistency and reduce the work of the HRBPs and/or Function Leads.

      Skills variants

      While core skills are great for driving consistency across your organisation, they can often feel too generic to be useful for multiple teams and disciplines. To get around this, we’ve seen teams create several versions of the same skill. In turn, the skill library becomes bloated and harder to manage, and the skills themselves have no relationship or equivalence making it impossible for employees to compare their role to those outside of their team.

      That’s why we created Skill Variants, which allows admins to create org-wide ‘parent’ skills, and team editors to create ‘child’ versions of those skills tailored to their teams’ disciplines.

      With skill variants you can:

      • Centralise skill management and maximise cross-team skill portability, while ensuring they’re tailored and relevant to each team’s needs

      • Let team editors create ‘child’ versions of core skills tailored to their discipline

      • Maintain a relationship with the core skill so there’s an equivalence between teams and shared data can be kept in sync

      • Easily compare a skill profile with other positions using variants of the same skill.

      Now you understand the basic building blocks of the framework, have outlined the way you'd like to structure your teams and the core skills you'd like every team to adopt, you're all set to create the template, core skills and teams.

      You’ll find step-by-step guidance to build your framework template, create new teams and skills, and lock skills in the Building a framework section of our Help Centre, plus top tips for writing great skills and positions in this manual.

       

      Read next: Creating great skills

      Read next: Creating great positions

       

      Once your framework template’s complete, it’s time to invite your HRBPs and/or Function Leads into the process, and pass the build over to them. We’ll kick this phase of the project off with the HRBP and Function Leads onboarding session. In this session, we’ll run through the templates and core skills you’ve created, explaining how to apply these to team frameworks, and we’ll cover how to write great positions and skills.