Think of a typical career-building story. You do your best to master the ins and outs of your craft, learn from mistakes, and apply acquired knowledge to grow every day. Becoming well-versed in their product, you eventually reach their professional ceiling at a senior position. What’s next?

A managerial position sounds like the obvious choice because it’s a straight career ladder: from a team lead to a manager to a C-level and eventually CEO. To some, this may sound like a dream come true, but others dread the burden of such responsibility. Not everyone wants to have a big team under their direct supervision. What if it’s not people you want to manage, but rather products, processes, and projects?

At Exness, we acknowledge this and see real value in an employee’s experience simply being a performer within their field. Our career paths aren’t strictly linear thanks to the separate ‘Manager’ and ‘Expert’ tracks. Let’s explore what they mean, how they affect your career, and which one is a better choice for you.

Your career. Your choice.

The blunt simplicity of this motto represents our firm belief that a person will do their best work in a field where they feel at home. That’s not to say that we discourage stepping out of your comfort zone to grow. But growth doesn’t have to be predetermined or strictly vertical, and where you’re making the next step is up to you.

Exness Career Tracks exist as guidelines for this choice, leading you on the path to becoming a manager, an expert, or a combination of both.

The Expert Career Track is about managing the processes, products, technology, and bearing responsibility for impactful decisions."

The idea behind the Expert Career Track comes from an appreciation for professional seniority. A newly hired engineer may assume the same position as a company old-timer, but only the veteran possesses the invaluable luggage of experience working with our product, familiarity with both new and old processes, understanding legacy code, etc.

As an expert, you’re not a nominal supervisor, but a center of your product’s unique expertise which keeps perpetually growing. Your new knowledge is regularly formalized and acknowledged in the company, allowing you to become a tech lead, or an expert of a certain level. While managing people isn’t a part of your responsibilities, you become the go-to person for advice and knowledge-sharing among colleagues, helping improve their expertise as well. Your guidance may even set trends and standards for the profession itself, helping colleagues build their competencies. Exness even has several “Guilds” for Business System Analysts and Data Engineers which establish the rules and procedures within their respective scopes of work, but the concept isn’t restricted by a specific profession or expertise.

The Manager Career Track involves learning to manage people and take responsibility for important decisions, the team’s work, and influencing their engagement and motivation."

When it comes to managers, you likely know the drill: take a step back from working on tasks, see the bigger picture, and effectively organize your team’s work. Your day will likely involve much more people interaction than before, with strategizing and planning in between. More importantly, a good manager must be a good leader – one who can maintain a healthy work environment within their team and is looked up to by its members.

The soft skills required to excel in this role are varied and plentiful, which is why Exness is offering a number of Leadership programs for employees seeking improvement in this area. Great leaders attract top talent and inspire a culture of performance through inspiration and respect.

The Hybrid Track allows you to master a variety of professional areas and try out different roles in different departments."

The Manager and Expert tracks aren’t mutually exclusive at Exness. All of our team leads are experts – they possess the hard skills to understand their teams’ technology and get their hands dirty if need be. They’ve grown and reached their current role coming from development, system analysis, QA, or other positions, meaning there’s never a gap in understanding the product between them and their teams. The Experts branch features architects – people who have walked the path of linear growth from Junior to Senior level and reached the peak. An architect’s level of expertise allows them to create a software structure from the ground up as they understand all the intricacies of their product.

Your path to becoming a Manager

Most Team Lead vacancies on the market require 3+ years of Team Lead experience. So where do you get them if you’re new to management?

We have a matrix of different experience requirements for each job title: for experts, managers, and C-level. These experiences include managing a project and successfully closing it, cross-functional interactions with other teams, cross-cultural experiences when you join a colleague from a different culture and help build bridges between offices, and of course experience leading people. The latter doesn’t mean you must have a whole team under your supervision: even if you’ve been mentoring an intern for 2 months, it’s considered as a leadership experience.

It’s not just a list that you can tick off, kick back and expect an offer for a management position though. Being proactive, showing intention and ambition, and being willing to go the extra mile are the secret ingredients. That extra mile doesn’t imply having to work day and night, sacrificing your weekends or taking 3 extra projects. Competent leadership involves smart prioritization, knowing when to say ‘no’, managing your time, showing progress, onboarding people, working on a project and spreading it all across different quarters, showing a variety of approaches and experiences.

Keep this in mind and take the necessary steps toward your goal:

• Step 1: Announce your intentions The more career sponsors, higher-ups, and generally people know that you’re aiming for a leadership role, the faster your movement towards it will be.

• Step 2: Go the extra mile. Take risks that can cost additional effort. You can’t grow by doing the same thing, it’s the law of life.

• Step 3: Talk to an Exness career consultant. We have 10 professional career consultants who know our culture, what’s written between the lines and how the career toolset works. Even simply double checking with them to see if you’re thinking correctly or asking how to behave in certain situations will set you on the right path.

Power isn’t given, it’s taken. You have to create the necessity for a leadership position in the heads of your superiors, and, crucially, put yourself forward as the right person for the job.

Your path to becoming an Expert

Just like with Managers, we have skill matrixes for potential Experts. For instance, an analyst’s skill matrix consists of 7 required skills, the proficiency of which affects their level - Junior, Middle, Senior, Expert or Architect. Evaluate yours and use our vast marketplace of courses on the Degreed Learning system to improve whatever you feel is lacking.

How do you know what needs improvement? Putting it in simple terms, we all can name at least one person who’s smarter than us. Learn from them. A colleague, a team lead, a current expert in the field - any role model who you can talk to and ask to share their knowledge system, what’s worth paying attention to, which books to read, podcasts to listen to. It’s a personal, head-on approach. It doesn’t mean you have to close specific gaps. Maybe you need to strengthen your existing talents, making your strong sides unique and ensuring there’s no equal.

• Step 1: Assess your skills Recognize which skills are required to become an expert in the field of your choosing, measure them against yours, and start looking for ways to improve.

• Step 2: Consult a knowledgeable person in the field Request a meeting with a team lead or an expert, discover how they operate, ask what you should work on.

• Step 3: Talk to an Exness career consultant. Whichever direction you choose to head in, they’re here to help and guide you.

We’re formally defining our Exness Experts through voting between employees and managers - these are people whose knowledge and experience is acknowledged as crucial for the company. Approaching them to talk about your aspirations is a huge step for your career development.

No wrong choices

When we say there’s value in this expertise, we mean it quite literally. There’s a preconceived notion that becoming a manager is the right way to go for better compensation.

We want our Experts track grading ladder to mirror the Managers’ one, to highlight the benefits of both, and to avoid making one the obvious choice for more success, recognition, or better compensation. You should be able to grow into a position that allows you to use the best of your abilities and be rewarded for it.

Our goal is to make both equally appealing so that when trying to make up your mind about which track to pick, your thoughts won’t be on which is more prestigious, but on where you’d feel more comfortable exercising your strengths. This brings more value to the company, while making you feel more valued as a part of it.

Choose wisely!