Samman Technical Coaching Career
Technical coaches are skilled software developers who help others to adopt better coding practices. Becoming a coach is one possible career path in technical organisations. We are defining ten Samman Coaching Career Milestones along the path from senior developer to Samman Technical Coach.
There are two main goals with defining these career milestones. Firstly to support developers in their career progression. The Samman Society will provide appropriate training and support for people who are on this journey. The second goal is to help organizations to understand the career progression towards technical coach and ensure they have suitable job descriptions, compensation and hiring practices.
The exact details of the milestones are still being worked on by the Samman Society but we are sharing a draft of what we have so far. The two main skills for Samman Coaching are Learning Hour and Ensemble, and we have career milestones for each. Initially, senior developers usually want to coach the teams they are part of, so the first career milestones are all about the skills you need to do that well. Later milestones are about handling other teams, more challenging situations, and eventually coaching other coaches.
Samman Coaching Career Milestones
We divide competencies into two tracks, with five Samman Coaching Career Milestones in each:
These milestones loosely correspond to significant changes in the individual’s job title and the composition of their working days. Competence is acknowledged within the individual’s organization as they start doing a different job and get the associated title and benefits.
After reaching milestone 4 in both tracks, technical coaches should have the skills and experience they need to be invited to join the Samman Technical Coaching society. (Such an invitation of membership is offered at the discretion of the society’s board). After milestone 5 people will be able to lead training for other coaches.
The Samman Society offers various training courses to support people working towards these milestones.
Additional Competencies Needed for Successful Coaching
In parallel with passing these competency milestones, senior developers will need to motivate and encourage their own teams to take part in the coaching sessions they organize and lead. Towards milestones 4 and 5 it will become increasingly important to explain and motivate the value of their work to others in the organization, including managers and members of other development teams. Recruiting teams for coaching can be a big part of the role. These skills in marketing and communication are also learnable.
A Note on Certification
We don’t currently plan to certify people in the Samman method because it seems to be very difficult to do well. We will provide training and mentoring that is designed to help individuals to reach new milestones, which includes ‘certificates of participation’ for training courses. If Samman society members have worked with people and seen them in action on the job we can provide individual references on request.
“Samman Coaching” is an official trademark registered in the EU (#019000476) and owned by the Samman Technical Coaching Society. The right to refer to yourself as a “Samman Technical Coach” is reserved for members.