Rackspace Technology, a multicloud technology solutions company, has announced a revitalized Technical Career Track (TCT) program intended to provide technical team members a path into senior roles.
The program amplifies the technical team member’s voice as thought leaders, bridging across technologies and teams, to create one technical voice and advancement for top technical talent.
The TCT is a program designed to:
Attract, retain, and grow top technical talent, offering individual contributors a non-people-management career path through Director, Senior Direct, Vice President, and Senior Vice President levels.
Expose top technical Rackers (Rackspace Technology employees) to a broader range of business problems, opportunities, and senior leadership.
Provide a venue for regular cross functional discussion and solutioning among technical leaders.
After entering the TCT program, a Racker remains embedded within their existing team, but with the recognition of TCT membership comes an expectation that TCT Rackers become increasingly cognizant of greater Rackspace Technology business goals and challenges, and that TCT Rackers leverage their role within their group to further the purposes (both technical and non-technical) of the company.
“The idea of recognizing top technical talent is not new and many companies use titles such as ‘distinguished engineer’ or ‘fellow’ to designate key technical people, but Rackspace Technology sees a distinction between those titles and its TCT members, who are expected to be involved in business decisions,” said Travis Runty, Vice President of Technical Support and Global Cloud Services for Rackspace Technology. “It’s more than just a badge or award you receive in this program, the TCT program provides a clear advancement path for technical staff. It helps employees avoid the mid-career plateau that can stymie technical people’s advancement, and it helps Rackspace Technology avoid losing experienced people to attrition.”
To be eligible for the TCT program, technical Rackers need to have advanced through the typical career path in their area of expertise. Candidates usually come from technical support, internal IT and systems management or product engineering. Candidates are screened by their respective business units, then by a global TCT committee and after successfully completing the screening process, they are recommended for acceptance into the program.
Within the TCT program, there are four ranks: Principal, Senior Principal, Distinguished and Fellow. These levels are equivalent to director, Senior director, VP and SVP, respectively. The TCT program gives top technical personnel the opportunity to rise to executive-level leadership positions within the company, without having to manage people or give up their technical work. TCT team members take part in strategic company decisions and are compensated at rates equivalent to senior management staff.
The TCT program has been a huge boost for top technical talent at Rackspace Technology and the program also benefits the company by increasing accuracy of estimations, making wiser and better decisions, speeding time to response or time to market, and increasing the effectiveness of products and services. For example, the Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud™ was brought to the market faster than any other product in the company’s history with the help of TCT members.
