Goddard Career-Path Tool Illustration
For any organization, a clearly defined career path is a significant motivator, fostering both morale and job satisfaction among employees. At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the importance of career path clarity has long been recognized. This recognition spurred the Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate (AETD) to initiate the development of a career-path tool approximately four years prior to this article, aiming to empower employees in their career planning journey.
The initial concept was straightforward: to create a user-friendly career path “map.” Inspired by the familiar Washington, D.C., Metro subway system map, the tool was envisioned to present career “ladders” akin to subway routes. These ladders would provide employees with a structured framework for visualizing and strategizing their professional growth within Goddard.
Despite the promising start, the AETD career-path project was temporarily sidelined due to pressing organizational priorities. However, Maria So, a leader at Goddard, remained committed to the vision of an accessible career-path tool. Years later, in her role as deputy director of the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate (SMA), So revisited the concept. Recognizing the tool’s potential to bolster organizational strength within SMA, enhance employee morale and retention, and aid in the recruitment of skilled engineers, scientists, and administrative staff, she decided to revitalize the career-path “Metro Map” initiative.
While developing new systems is familiar territory for an engineer like So, her approach emphasized strong collaboration and shared leadership. She sought partnership with Verron “Ron” Brade, director of Goddard’s Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM), a key stakeholder in employee development. With the support of Judy Bruner, director of Goddard’s SMA Directorate, So and Brade joined forces to build a career path tailored for the SMA Directorate. This project was perfectly aligned with Brade’s strategy to transform OHCM into a proactive and valuable partner for Goddard’s various directorates, leading to his enthusiastic agreement to collaborate. Together, they assembled a dedicated team comprising Nichole Pinkney, chief of OHCM’s Talent Cultivation Office; Nancy Lindsey, mission systems senior reliability manager; and David Wilhelm, senior human resources consultant.
So’s vision for the career-path tool was rooted in providing defined career paths or “ladders” for each discipline within Goddard. Furthermore, she emphasized the need for web accessibility, ensuring that employees could easily access career-path information and explore diverse career trajectories relevant to their roles. The SMA Directorate, like other parts of Goddard, encompasses a variety of disciplines. A common challenge was that employees often lacked clarity regarding the necessary training or experience for promotions, lateral movements to new positions, or transitions to different disciplines.
Nichole Pinkney immediately recognized the potential to scale the career-path system beyond SMA and implement it center-wide. She understood that a comprehensive career-path system could offer Goddard employees a holistic view of growth and development opportunities, including pathways for transitioning between disciplines. Moreover, she envisioned its utility in identifying core competencies and skill sets that naturally feed into leadership development within the center.
Driven by this broader vision, Pinkney allocated a budget for a small business contractor to rapidly develop a prototype system for SMA. She prioritized accurate data capture as crucial to the system’s effectiveness and ensured the active involvement of David Wilhelm, given his extensive expertise in human-capital development. Wilhelm formulated insightful questions for SMA managers to ensure the collection of pertinent training data across all disciplines. He then conducted interviews with SMA managers alongside the SMA implementation team, expertly guiding the data-capture process. Following initial data validation by SMA management, Wilhelm conducted a further review and validation with other OHCM disciplines, ensuring data integrity and comprehensiveness.
Nancy Lindsey assumed the critical role of implementation manager, leveraging her extensive experience in program management, requirements development, and software development. Her knowledge was instrumental in managing the project and assembling a skilled team. This team included Wilhelm; B-Line Express, a small business contractor with a proven track record in design and internet application development since 1995; and SMA managers who provided essential career data and validated its integration into the SMA career-path website.
Project sponsors provided valuable guidance and suggestions throughout the design phase and during debriefing meetings. They empowered the team to creatively address the challenges of developing an innovative career-path tool. When faced with obstacles, the development team adopted a collaborative problem-solving approach, often documenting potential solutions to facilitate collective idea consideration.
One significant challenge was visually representing the transition options between ten distinct SMA technical positions across seven grade levels without creating an overwhelming and confusing “spaghetti” of lines. The team effectively used the human-capital interview data and storyboarding techniques to overcome this hurdle.
Interviews and human-capital management data confirmed that promotional transitions within disciplines followed consistent patterns and were well-defined within standard career paths. Therefore, the focus shifted to representing transitions between disciplines. The team then utilized storyboarding and whiteboarding sessions to explore various concepts, meticulously mapping out user clicks and interactions. The solution they arrived at was a textual list within the discipline description window, coupled with a graphical representation of transition options by grade and discipline. This approach effectively conveyed consistent data to users without creating a visually cluttered and confusing representation of numerous paths.
The same collaborative process was applied to address the challenge of illustrating transitions from technical roles to supervisory responsibilities. The team’s strength lay in its blend of engineering and human-capital expertise, which added both efficiency and depth to the design decision-making process.
B-Line Express was entrusted with the task of building an application that embodied the project’s vision and objectives. The company collaborated closely with Lindsey and Wilhelm, engaging in frequent communication to refine web-based design concepts and strategies for delivering effective career-path guidance and workforce strategic planning. The team heavily relied on storyboarding to translate ideas from team meetings into tangible web-based application designs. This iterative approach proved to be a rapid and efficient method for developing the application while staying true to the vision formulated by So and the team.
The B-Line development team, led by project manager Nancy Rackley, comprised a graphic designer, a web-application developer, and a database engineer—all essential skill sets for the project’s success. Leveraging B-Line’s experience with similar applications, the team incorporated cutting-edge web technologies to ensure a robust user interface, delivering these capabilities swiftly and cost-effectively. Furthermore, the B-Line team utilized various collaboration tools to facilitate application implementation while fostering autonomy for innovation, crucial for a geographically distributed team. This approach significantly streamlined software configuration management during development and enhanced communication among team members.
The culmination of this collaborative endeavor was a fully functional career-path application, designed, developed, and populated with data by a diverse team of individuals in just six months. The benefits for Goddard employees are substantial, including enhanced career planning, training and development planning, and a positive boost to morale. Employee feedback on the tool has been overwhelmingly positive, aligning with the development team’s expectations.
“The career path is so easy to use and so helpful,” remarked one SMA employee, highlighting the tool’s user-friendliness and practical value.
Another employee noted, “For the first time I can actually see in front of me how the SMA Directorate is structured by position, and more importantly, by the ‘paths’,” emphasizing the tool’s ability to provide clarity and structure to career progression.
An OHCM employee commented, “I can see how the career path will help me build my IDP [individual development plan] and prepare me for my performance and development discussions with my supervisor,” demonstrating the tool’s integration into existing employee development processes.
According to Diversity News and Views, a recent survey indicated that approximately 54 percent of workers consider knowing their career path to be very important to their overall job satisfaction, ranking it nearly as high as compensation. The career path tool also benefits Goddard management by providing a valuable resource for succession planning (leadership development), aiding supervisors in employee career-development discussions, positively impacting retention and recruitment efforts, enhancing cross-organizational integration, and strengthening vital connections between various center functions.
This career-path project serves as a model of successful interdepartmental cooperation to achieve a shared objective. So, Pinkney, Lindsey, and Wilhelm exemplified collaborative leadership throughout the project. Each willingly took on ad hoc responsibilities to build an innovative career-path system in a cost-effective manner. Together, they fulfilled the shared goal of providing employees with career-building information, empowering them to proactively manage their professional journeys. In the process, they established a positive and efficient collaborative framework between the SMA and OHCM organizations at Goddard.
About the Authors
| David Wilhelm has dedicated over twenty years to training and development, encompassing the full spectrum of instructional systems design activities for all employment levels. He currently serves as a senior human resources development specialist within the Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM) at Goddard Space Flight Center. | |
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| Nancy Lindsey brings over twenty-seven years of experience in aviation and aerospace engineering, having undertaken diverse engineering roles across space-vehicle life cycles and program types. She currently holds the position of senior systems reliability manager at Goddard. | |
| Nichole Pinkney has been involved in training development for more than fifteen years. She is currently the Chief of the Talent Cultivation Office within OHCM at Goddard, leading a team of expert HR development professionals specializing in career development and learning. She has been instrumental in numerous HR development initiatives. | |
| Nancy Rackley has been with B-Line Express for over a decade, contributing to the development of several applications for NASA centers. As B-Line’s NASA program manager, she oversees various website/application design, development, and maintenance projects at Goddard. | |
| Maria So currently serves as the Deputy Director for Planning and Business Management of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate at Goddard. Her prior roles include Deputy Director of the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate, Associate Chief of the Mission Engineering and Systems Analysis Division in the Engineering Directorate, and Branch Chief of the Mission Systems Engineering branch. |
