Career Framework, Competency Design & People Assessment

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · On-site/Hybrid · Full-time · Senior/Lead level

About GEEK Up

GEEK Up is a Ho Chi Minh City-based product development company, founded in 2014. Known as a trusted product partner, we work with clients end-to-end — product strategy, UX/UI design, and engineering — with a team close to 100 people. We run on a flat, self-managed structure: business units, cross-functional groups, and delivery teams, with no line managers in the conventional sense.

About the Role

At most companies, a career ladder is written once by HR/L&D team, handed down, and rarely touched again — a PDF nobody quite trusts, checked once a year at review time when it's already too late to matter.

GEEK Up builds career growth as a living system instead of a static document. Rather than a fixed training curriculum assigned by role, we build a flexible menu: the framework defines what each level actually means and what closes a specific skill gap, and every person chooses their own path through it — growth is offered, never assigned. A level description isn't trusted just because someone wrote it well; it has to prove itself against real assessment data first, showing that two different assessors read it the exact same way. And success here was never we published a framework — it's whether any person can look at where they stand today and know exactly what to do next, without having to ask anyone.

This role owns that entire system: the competency framework that defines what each level means, the menu of development solutions that closes a person's skill gap, and the assessment tools that prove the whole thing actually holds up in practice.

What You'll Do

Competency Framework Design — defining what each level actually means

Build and maintain the competency framework — define each skill/competency area, describe what good looks like at every level, and keep a clear process running from first draft to a validated, approved standard.
Own the logic behind every role's competency profile — profiles should be generated from the underlying competencies a role actually needs, not hand-written one by one. This is what keeps every profile accurate as the underlying skills evolve.
Write and own the company's foundation skills yourself — cross-cutting skills like Communication, Critical Thinking, and Facilitation that every team relies on. For team-specific technical competencies, you supply the method and hold the quality bar only; the content itself stays with the team that owns that expertise.

Learning & Development Solutions — the menu people actually choose from

Curate the full catalogue of development solutions using a classic 70-20-10 model (70% on-the-job experience, 20% coaching/mentoring, 10% structured training) — each solution documented with a clear brief: purpose, format, target level, the skill gap it closes, who can run it, and what it needs to work.
Design the logic that helps someone find their own next step — the matching rule between a development solution and a person's specific gap, plus a personalized what's next for me view built from real, current data.
Keep the offering honest and relevant — when the data shows zero uptake on a program, find out whether it's a design problem, bad timing, unclear positioning, or simply solving a gap nobody actually has, before quietly dropping it.

Assessment & Calibration — the proof that it actually works

Own the calibration standard across the whole company — check how competency levels compare across different teams and disciplines, so that Senior means the same thing everywhere it's used.
Build the tools used to assess someone's level — structured self-assessment and peer/manager assessment, an ongoing evidence log, and behavior-based rating guides tailored to each type of program.
Continuously test every level description against real assessment results and revise it until it clearly tells levels apart. If two assessors independently read the same evidence into two different levels, that's a flaw in the framework — not a matter of interpretation.

What You Bring

Experience designing a competency framework, career ladder, or assessment system end to end — not just delivering training against one someone else already built.
Competency modelling & documentation: able to write clear, complete documentation for company-wide foundation skills (e.g. Communication, Critical Thinking, Facilitation) — purpose, proficiency levels, and supporting materials — precise enough for any team to use without further clarification. Domain-specific technical competencies stay with the team that owns that expertise.
Comfortable holding a quality bar in a room full of people who know their own craft better than you do — your job is asking how they'd read something differently, not defending your own wording.
Systems thinking: able to keep a competency structure coherent while individual pieces evolve at different speeds, without freezing everything in place.
Sharp, precise writing — a level description clear enough that two different assessors land on the exact same reading.
Evidence-driven: you revise a framework because the data says so, and you can tell an unclear description apart from simply thin evidence — the two need opposite fixes.
Comfortable operating on influence rather than authority — your leverage is whether people actually adopt what you design, not a mandate from above.
A background in an adjacent field — assessment design, learning/instructional design, or hands-on delivery experience deep enough to know what a good standard has to hold up against.
Experience in a flat or self-managed organization is a strong plus.

Why This Role Is Different

You're not adapting a framework — you're inventing one. Nearly every competency model on the market assumes a company with managers and hierarchy; GEEK Up is flat and moving toward Teal, so there's no existing playbook for what a level or a foundation skill means here. This is first-of-its-kind work, not a customization job.
Nothing goes live without proof. No competency description ships on your word alone — it's tested against two real assessment cycles first. If two assessors read it differently, that's a defect you're accountable for fixing, not a gray area you get to accept.
Impact is measured by adoption, not paperwork. You won't be the one running training sessions — that's a separate, dedicated team. Your measure of success is whether people can actually see their own next career step and take it on their own; a framework nobody uses has failed, no matter how well it's written.

Organization Development Lead