ANZ to remodel engineering career paths around domain 'mastery'

ANZ Banking Group is creating new career paths for engineers that pegs progression opportunities to their "mastery" of skills and domain knowledge, not their ability to manage teams.

Chief technology officer Tim Hogarth told the FST Media Future of Financial Services Sydney 2022 conference that the conventional career path in a bank was to work one's way up from the branches to regional and potentially central management.

However, he noted that engineers are often motivated by factors other than a pathway to management.

"Engineers aren't motivated necessarily by managing other engineers," Hogarth said.

"They're motivated often by leading other engineers but by learning from other engineers [as well].

"There's [also] a particular aspect of engineering that is motivated by mastery."

Hogarth said the bank is about to internally unveil new career progression options for its engineers.

"We're going to be creating a new career model for our engineers where we no longer expect people to progress through a position of increased management responsibilities, but instead an increased level of mastery," he said.

Mastery will be based on domains including software, infrastructure, cloud, data, security, site reliability, support and quality.

The new career outline should mean once an engineer reaches more senior roles, “they won't be put into a position where they have to necessarily manage people”.

"We'll also have distinguished engineers who lead teams, that don't have the day-to-day administration, responsibilities of oversight, but do educate and uplift people," Hogarth said.

ANZ is far from alone in building a software engineering capability, and that means finding ways to stand out.

"Engineers have a choice [of where to work]," Hogarth said.

"They're spoilt for choice. The entire world is feverishly figuring out person that has engineering ability."

Hogarth wanted to create an environment and culture where people who are starting their engineering journey “will come to ANZ to learn and people who are at the midpoint and beyond their engineering journey will be at ANZ to teach.”

“This collectively shared knowledge is something that we feel strongly and passionate about.”

The Australian public sector is also going through much the same process as ANZ, though it hasn't yet landed on a mechanism to enable and achieve it.