Skill mastery: How do you know when you’re there?
The worst: You go into your performance review feeling on fire, you’re handling all your projects, you’re leveling up in new ways, and then your boss disagrees.
“I think you need more work in this area before we make it official.”
How do you know when you’ve done it?
So many career levelling docs depend on "skill mastery" or task mastery in order to check the box that you're ready to own something or level up on it.
What’s more, your leadership may actually use this ambiguousness to deny you promotions or raises. Don’t let that happen, by being prepared to evaluate your own skills against the rubric here, or the rubric your company provides.
What does mastery mean?
I built this little list of journey steps at one point to illustrate it.
Mastery means you work up to the final step:
You can follow a training document to learn a task.
You can do the task without help to 99% accuracy, consistently.
You can manage many of these tasks in a project to hit a deadline or goal.
You can train others to also complete the task.
You can manage bigger and more complex versions of the project, including manage others who join to help on the project.
You can communicate the context, progress, results, and impact to others.
You can troubleshoot issues and reach out to the right people for help when needed.
You "own" the area of responsibility and are assigned in RASCI or OKRs.
You've been on at least 12 marketing podcasts about it with a pun name like "up and to the rizz"
What else would you add or what order would you change?
