At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, fostering employee morale and career fulfillment is paramount. Recognizing the critical need for clear career pathways, Goddard’s Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate (AETD) initiated a project to develop a user-friendly career-path tool. This initiative, born approximately four years prior, aimed to empower employees with a transparent roadmap for their professional growth within the organization.
The core concept was to create a career-path “map,” intuitively designed like the Washington, D.C., Metro subway system map. This familiar format would illustrate various career “ladders,” guiding employees in charting their future career progression within Goddard. However, due to pressing operational demands, the AETD career-path project was temporarily put on hold. Yet, the vision of an accessible career-path tool remained a priority for Goddard leader Maria So.
Years later, So’s promotion to Deputy Director of the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate (SMA) reignited the career-path initiative. Recognizing its potential to bolster organizational strength within SMA, enhance employee morale and retention, and attract top-tier engineers, scientists, and administrative professionals, So decided to revisit the “Metro Map” concept.
For So, an engineer accustomed to system development, success hinged on robust collaboration and shared leadership. She sought partnership with Verron “Ron” Brade, Director of Goddard’s Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM). With the endorsement of Judy Bruner, Director of Goddard’s SMA Directorate, So engaged Brade to collaboratively develop a career path tailored for the SMA Directorate. This project resonated deeply with Brade’s strategic goals for OHCM, envisioning the office as a proactive and valuable partner. He readily embraced the collaboration. 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.
Goddard Career Path Tool Illustration
Illustration depicting the Goddard Career Path Tool, showcasing a metro map-style design for navigating career progression within NASA Goddard.
So’s vision for the career-path tool centered on clearly defined paths, or “ladders,” for each discipline within SMA. Crucially, the tool needed to be web-accessible, enabling employees to easily explore career-path information and understand the diverse pathways available in their roles. Like many Goddard directorates, SMA encompassed a wide array of disciplines. Employees often lacked clarity regarding the necessary training or experience for promotions, lateral moves, or transitions to different disciplines.
Pinkney immediately recognized the broader potential of a career-path system extending beyond SMA, envisioning a center-wide implementation. She understood that a comprehensive career-path system could provide Goddard employees with a holistic view of growth and development opportunities, including inter-disciplinary transitions. Furthermore, it could serve as a valuable resource for identifying competencies and skills essential for nurturing future leadership.
Driven by this vision, Pinkney allocated a targeted budget to engage a small business contractor to rapidly prototype a system for SMA. She emphasized the critical importance of accurate data capture for the tool’s efficacy. Pinkney ensured that Wilhelm, with his profound insight into human-capital development, would play a central role in this pioneering project. Wilhelm meticulously crafted a set of insightful questions for SMA managers, designed to capture comprehensive training data across all disciplines. He spearheaded interviews alongside the SMA implementation team, expertly guiding the data-capture process. Following initial data validation by SMA management, Wilhelm conducted a thorough review and validation with other OHCM disciplines.
Lindsey, understanding the goals defined by So and Pinkney, assumed the pivotal role of implementation manager. Her extensive background in program management, requirements development, and software engineering equipped her with the expertise to effectively manage the project and assemble a team with the necessary skill sets for success. Lindsey’s 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 offered valuable guidance and suggestions throughout the design phase and during debriefing sessions. They empowered the team to creatively address the challenge of developing an innovative career-path tool. When faced with complex issues, the development team adopted a collaborative problem-solving approach, documenting potential solutions to facilitate collective evaluation of ideas.
One significant challenge was visually representing the option for users to transition between ten distinct SMA technical positions across seven grade levels, without creating an overly complex and confusing network of transition lines. The team leveraged the human-capital interview data and employed storyboarding techniques to resolve this design hurdle.
Interviews and human-capital management insights confirmed that promotional transitions within disciplines were consistent and aligned with standard career paths. Therefore, the focus shifted to showcasing transitions between disciplines. The team then utilized storyboarding and whiteboarding sessions to explore various concepts, meticulously tracing user interactions. The solution emerged as 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 the user without creating a visually overwhelming representation of numerous paths.
The team applied a similar process to address the challenge of illustrating transitions from technical to supervisory roles. The diverse expertise within the team, encompassing both engineering and human-capital perspectives, enhanced the efficiency and depth of design decision-making.
B-Line Express was tasked with building an application that embodied the original vision’s goals and objectives. The company engaged in close and frequent collaboration with Lindsey and Wilhelm to refine web-based design concepts and develop optimal strategies for delivering career-path guidance and strategic workforce planning. The team extensively utilized storyboarding to translate ideas from team meetings into tangible web-based application designs. This iterative process proved to be a rapid and effective method for developing the application and ensuring its alignment with So and the team’s original vision.
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. Leveraging B-Line’s experience with similar applications, the team incorporated cutting-edge web technologies to ensure a robust user interface, delivering these capabilities efficiently and cost-effectively. The B-Line team also utilized various collaboration tools to implement the application 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 within just six months. The benefits for Goddard employees are substantial, including enhanced career planning, improved training and development planning, and a positive impact on overall morale. Employee feedback on the tool has been overwhelmingly positive, mirroring the development team’s expectations.
“The career path is so easy to use and so helpful,” remarked an SMA employee.
“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,’” noted another employee, highlighting the tool’s clarity and transparency.
An employee from OHCM 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,” emphasizing the tool’s practical application for individual development.
According to Diversity News and Views, a recent survey indicated that approximately 54 percent of workers consider knowing their career path as crucial to job satisfaction, rivaling compensation in importance. The career-path tool also benefits Goddard management by providing a resource for succession planning (leadership development), facilitating supervisor-employee career development discussions, positively influencing retention and recruitment efforts, enhancing cross-organizational integration, and strengthening critical links between various center functions.
This career-path project exemplifies the power of collaboration to achieve shared objectives. So, Pinkney, Lindsey, and Wilhelm demonstrated collaborative leadership throughout the project, each willingly accepting ad hoc responsibilities to develop an innovative and cost-effective career-path system. Together, they realized the shared goal of providing employees with valuable career-building data, empowering them to proactively manage their professional journeys. In the process, they established a positive and effective collaborative framework between the SMA and OHCM organizations at Goddard.
About the Authors
| David Wilhelm brings over two decades of experience in training and development, encompassing the full spectrum of instructional systems design for all employment levels. He currently serves as a Senior Human Resources Development Specialist in the Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM) at Goddard Space Flight Center. | |
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| Nancy Lindsey has dedicated over twenty-seven years to aviation and aerospace engineering, undertaking 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 a leader 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 spearheaded numerous HR development initiatives. | |
| Nancy Rackley has contributed to B-Line Express for over a decade, playing a key role in developing various applications for NASA centers. As B-Line’s NASA Program Manager, she oversees diverse website/application design, development, and maintenance projects at Goddard. | |
| Maria So is 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. |
