To get to where you want to be, you’re going to need a little help.
That’s the idea behind an educational concept called the zone of proximal development (ZPD), coined by 20th-century psychologist Lev Vygotsky and widely studied among educators to this day. When someone is learning a new skill, there are three tiers of knowledge: everything you can learn on your own, everything you can’t learn at your current level and what you can learn with help — the ZPD. Everything in the ZPD is within a person’s grasp, but not without help from an expert that can guide, teach and demonstrate the skill for them. With the help of a mentor, the level of skill that a person can achieve grows significantly.
While Vygotsky’s concept was coined for education, it holds true for most instances of learning — including professional career development. At any job, there will be a lot that employees can pick up just by doing it; however, without help, they will be limited in their learning. A good manager can be that all-important mentor figure, fostering growth and guiding team members in the right direction. That sort of support will help employees greatly expand their knowledge.
Built In Boston talked to employees from three local tech companies who received such support. BookBub’s Ellie Redding, EDB’s Andrea Aparicio and Ellevation Education’s Demetrius Johnson shared how their companies provided the boost they needed to learn, grow and advance their careers.
What role were you first hired for in your company?
I joined BookBub as part of our rotational program, where I spent a few months rotating through several different teams across the company. I wrote and edited copy as part of our editorial team, I ran ad campaigns for the marketing team, I tested and rolled out a few new features as a product manager, and I got my first introduction to full-stack web development as an engineer. When the year-long program wrapped up, I settled into an engineering role full time, where I spent most of my time building user-facing web features or improving our internal admin tooling.
What role are you in now? Tell us a bit about the journey that got you there and the coolest project you’re working on currently.
I’m currently tech lead for our data engineering team. After about a year and a half in web development, I was looking for some new challenges, so I rotated onto our nascent data engineering team. Since then, I’ve worked on a huge variety of data systems and projects that challenged me technically and pushed me on my communication, project management and other soft skills. Now, as tech lead, I support and empower my teammates and help make sure we’re delivering impactful, high-quality work for the business.
Right now, we’re wrapping up a project to improve some key datasets. Several of our internal datasets are affected by bot traffic, spammy user behavior or other data quality issues that we’ve had to account for when doing analysis. My team has been working on cleaning up this data under the hood, before it gets to analysts. Now, users always have the most accurate data possible without having to handle these issues themselves — or even be aware of them. This was challenging and exciting because it required us to roll out significant changes to datasets used by nearly everyone in the company, every day, without interrupting anyone’s access to the data they need.
I’ve had the space to work through challenges on my own and I’ve always had support from my manager and teammates when I needed help.”
How has your company supported your career growth throughout this journey?
BookBub’s rotational program is founded on the belief that investing in people’s growth pays off. The program gave me the opportunity to try my hand at several different job functions, picking up skills and experience with each, which has enabled me to contribute in unique and important ways in my work as an engineer.
But it’s not just the rotational program — this growth mindset is evident across the company. For example, most engineers rotate product teams once a year or so, which gives us the opportunity to take on new problems, gain experience with different tech stacks and work with new people. Rotating onto the data team was probably the single biggest catalyst of my career growth since becoming an engineer, but even since settling onto the data team, I’ve grown enormously. I’ve been given engaging and challenging work, I’ve been asked to lead projects that exercised and developed my skills, I’ve had the space to work through challenges on my own and I’ve always had support from my manager and teammates when I needed help.
What role were you first hired for in your company?
My first role at Ellevation was a training solutions manager (TSM). My job was training district teams on how to use the software to support their compliance requirements and instructional needs. It was also pretty customary for me to take on somewhat of a consultative role when planning out training sessions and during training with district EL leads and other educators on how the platform could be leveraged within their current workflow processes.
What role are you in now? Tell us a bit about the journey that got you there and the coolest project you’re working on currently.
My current role is manager of professional services, which happens to be on the same team I started out as a TSM with. It has been a huge honor leading the team and very humbling. I honestly wouldn’t have thought I would be in this position, especially after interviewing and not being selected for another leadership role within the company. That being said, I believe things worked out on my behalf.
Given the newness of the team, the coolest thing I’ve done at this point was create a system that allowed me to onboard the new hires well within the 90-day timeframe. They were called the onboarding intensives; they allowed me to train them on our workflow, materials and content they’ll use at a high rate. These intensives put the new trainers in a position to facilitate training right around two months.
The coolest thing I’ve done at this point was create a system that allowed me to onboard the new hires well within the 90-day timeframe.”
What is the most important skill you’ve acquired on the job? How did you pick up and hone this skill?
The most important skill I’ve acquired is flexibility. I understand that change is inevitable and I’m okay with that. However, I’ve long been a process guy and sometimes put too much effort into holding the line when it really should be utilized as just a guide. I’ve learned to focus on this skill a lot more since changing roles. Part of my development has been addressing every situation that requires a little flex uniquely — assessing the circumstance with the guidance of the process, but with a “one size does NOT fit all” mentality.
What role were you first hired for in your company?
I was hired as a web marketing specialist to work mostly on the website, fixing bugs and building web pages. One of my primary responsibilities was to run health checks on the website and organic traffic using Google Analytics while using this data to recommend SEO tactics to improve our ranking.
What role are you in now? Tell us a bit about the journey that got you there and the coolest project you’re working on currently.
I am currently a digital marketing manager responsible for our advertising strategy, web analytics and public sector demand generation programs, among other things.
Ever since I started my role at EDB, I have been very vocal about the projects I want to be a part of and the career path I want to follow. This determination and constant communication with my manager has allowed me to grow from a web marketing specialist to leading some of the most crucial projects in marketing, including managing our social media accounts, spearheading the marketing strategy behind a regional sales team and kickstarting our employer branding presence during our time of rapid growth.
One of the coolest projects I am working on is building the strategy behind our global webinars. We run bi-weekly webinars, and I am responsible for brainstorming and executing our webinar content sessions. This project provides excellent visibility of my role to the company’s senior leadership team. It’s also just plain fun to work with different — and pretty important — members of our organization and the PostgreSQL community to help them deliver successful presentations.
My manager has made time to talk about career opportunities and asked us where we want to go and how he can help us get there.”
How has your company supported your career growth throughout this journey?
EDB has supported me in every step of my career. What I appreciate the most is that my manager has been a fantastic listener and mentor. He has made time for each and every one of his employees to talk about career opportunities and, most importantly, asked us where we want to go and how he can help us get there. In addition, EDB has provided us with resources to get training in areas of interest. I am happy to say that I am now both a scrum master who helps our go-to-market team with their tasks and priorities, and an objectives and key results certified coach who helps the marketing and web team establish solid objectives and key results for the quarter.
