My motto is "leave your people in a better place than where you found them."
I'm in design, so things are a little different from that and CS/programming - but when I onboard direct reports, I'll have a session or two dedicated to drilling down what they want to grow in and/or what they would like to focus on during their time with the company. Maybe they just want to collect a paycheck and have the paycheck subsidize their real interests (been there, all cool), but usually they have an area of design they'd like to improve in for their portfolio.
In that case, I will assign them the projects that best fits that interest, so they get more experience and hopefully a cool portfolio project in it. There's other factors that go into assigning projects (everyone's bandwidth, fairness, skill level of the team), but it's a significant one.
If they want more, I'll also give them optional/doable "homework assignments" to improve at that area of design, along with personal feedback. In design, your portfolio is (nearly) everything, and it's been extremely cool to see my IC's genuinely excited to add projects to theirs that they're happy about.
Personally new enough as a manager that I haven't been through the promotion process with IC's yet, but this is a great question to study that. :)
I'm in design, so things are a little different from that and CS/programming - but when I onboard direct reports, I'll have a session or two dedicated to drilling down what they want to grow in and/or what they would like to focus on during their time with the company. Maybe they just want to collect a paycheck and have the paycheck subsidize their real interests (been there, all cool), but usually they have an area of design they'd like to improve in for their portfolio.
In that case, I will assign them the projects that best fits that interest, so they get more experience and hopefully a cool portfolio project in it. There's other factors that go into assigning projects (everyone's bandwidth, fairness, skill level of the team), but it's a significant one.
If they want more, I'll also give them optional/doable "homework assignments" to improve at that area of design, along with personal feedback. In design, your portfolio is (nearly) everything, and it's been extremely cool to see my IC's genuinely excited to add projects to theirs that they're happy about.
Personally new enough as a manager that I haven't been through the promotion process with IC's yet, but this is a great question to study that. :)