Careers · My Future Role
Plan your career, make the right choices from now till the end.
My Future Role is a tool in your AFQY member area. You upload your CV once. The tool reads it and turns it into a skills profile: each skill it finds, the level you have shown it at, and the line of your CV that proves it. From that profile it does two practical jobs.
- Check your CV against a role you want to apply for.Paste the job advertisement, or its link. You get back what you already have for that role, what you partly have, and the gaps an employer will notice. Use it to decide whether to apply, and to shape your CV, your cover letter and how you approach the hiring manager before you send anything.
- See your future roles and what to build.The tool ranks the five roles you are closest to out of 49 New Zealand tech roles, across engineering, data, security, infrastructure, delivery and leadership. Each one shows the gap as a percentage and names the exact skills and experience you need to add, so you can plan the next two or three years rather than guess at them.
Every level comes with the evidence behind it, and you can correct any level the tool got wrong. Skills are cross-referenced to SFIA, the framework New Zealand employers recruit against, so the words match the job ads you will read.
Your next five roles, ranked
The roles up to two levels above where your CV places you, in your track and the ones beside it, each with a gap percentage. Including the moves people rarely think to consider.
Evidence, not guesswork
Every skill and level on your profile is backed by a line from your own CV. You can see the line, correct the level, or add a skill the CV does not show, and the tool says plainly which numbers are yours.
How good a fit am I?
Any job ad, compared against your profile skill by skill. What you clearly have, what you partly have, and what is genuinely missing, so you know before you apply.
See it before you sign in
This is the real tool, with an example already filled in: the profile a Senior Software Developer's CV produced, the five roles it is closest to, why the nearest one is the nearest, and how that same person fits an example Lead Developer advertisement. Everything below is exactly what members see. To run it on your own CV, sign in.
Preview · example only
Sign in to read your own CVExample: a Senior Software Developer with eight years in tech. Every level below comes with the line of the CV that supports it.
Senior Software Developer · Software Engineering
8 of 10 requirements met; 1 core skill to close, in a track your CV already shows.
Missing: Mentoring and coaching (needs 4, shows 3); Judgement and composure under pressure (needs 4, shows 3)
Mobile Developer · Software Engineering
6 of 9 requirements met; 1 core skill to close, in a track your CV already shows.
Missing: Mobile development (iOS, Android, cross-platform) (needs 3); Change and release management (CAB, app stores) (needs 3); UX and interaction design (Figma) (needs 2)
Front-End Developer · Software Engineering
7 of 10 requirements met; 2 core skills to close, in a track your CV already shows.
Missing: Front-end development (TypeScript, React, CSS) (needs 3); Accessibility (WCAG) (needs 3); UX and interaction design (Figma) (needs 2)
Senior Test Analyst / Automation Engineer (SDET) · Software Engineering
4 of 10 requirements met; 2 core skills to close, in a track your CV already shows.
Missing: Quality strategy and release confidence (needs 4); Test automation (Playwright, Cypress, unit frameworks) (needs 4, shows 3); Test design and exploratory testing (needs 4); CI/CD pipelines (needs 4, shows 3); Mentoring and coaching (needs 4, shows 3); Attention to detail and process discipline (needs 4)
Data Engineer · Data & Analytics
4 of 9 requirements met; 1 core skill to close, a move into a new track.
Missing: Data pipelines and platforms (Airflow, Kafka, Databricks, Snowflake) (needs 4); Data quality and testing (needs 4); Warehouse data modelling (dbt, star schemas) (needs 3); Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) (needs 4, shows 3); Monitoring, alerting and observability (needs 3)
What your CV shows
8 years in tech · highest level evidenced: 4 · tap a skill for the evidence
Not evidenced: The CV shows no people leadership, budget ownership or formal stakeholder management, and no data or security specialisation.
Why Senior Software Developer is the nearest
- You meet 8 of 10 requirements on what the CV shows. The gap is 5%.
- Mentoring and coaching: your CV shows level 3, Apply (Mentored two graduate developers through their first year). This role needs level 4, Enable; core to the role.
- Judgement and composure under pressure: your CV shows level 3, Apply (Made the call to roll back the release during the Black Friday incident). This role needs level 4, Enable; expected.
- You bring Designing software systems at level 4, Enable: Designed the event-driven order pipeline and wrote the architecture decision records for it.
- You bring Software development (core language and framework) at level 4, Enable: Led development of the payments and onboarding services in TypeScript and Node over three years.
How good a fit am I for this role?
An example job advertisement, read on its own and scored against the profile above. This is the report a member gets back, with every line quoting the CV.
Lead Developer · A Wellington fintech (example)
A stretch: achievable, with real gaps to name.
- You meet 3 of 8 requirements on what the CV shows. The gap is 35%.
- Mentoring and coaching: your CV shows level 3 (Mentored two graduate developers through their first year). This role needs level 5; core to the role.
- Designing software systems: your CV shows level 4 (Designed the event-driven order pipeline and wrote the architecture decision records for it). This role needs level 5; core to the role.
- Delivery ownership and flow: not evidenced in your CV. This role needs level 5 and it is expected.
- Stakeholder management: not evidenced in your CV. This role needs level 4 and it is expected.
- Secure development and DevSecOps: your CV shows level 3 (Added dependency scanning and secrets checks to the pipeline). This role needs level 4; expected.
- You bring Software development (core language and framework) at level 4: Led development of the payments and onboarding services in TypeScript and Node over three years.
Also asked for, which this tool cannot rate: New Zealand work rights; experience in a regulated financial environment.
Compare any two roles
The same map also compares any two roles side by side, here a Senior Software Developer looking at Data Architect, two levels up and across into a different track.
Where you are, and where you're heading
Pick your current role and the role you're aiming for. Roles marked ▲ sit above your current level. Click any role name to see what it involves.
Likely next roles from Senior Software Developer(one to two levels up)
Senior Software Developer
Software Engineering · Level 4 of 7
Technical anchor of a delivery team: leads design of significant pieces, raises the bar on quality, and grows the developers around them.
Core skills: System design · Mentoring and code review leadership · Performance and security awareness · Refactoring legacy code · Cross-team collaboration · Pragmatic trade-off judgement
Full skill definitions on SFIA ↗Data Architect
Data & Analytics · Level 6 of 7
Designs how data flows and lives across the whole organisation: platforms, integration, governance and the roadmap to get there.
Core skills: Enterprise data architecture · Integration patterns · Governance and privacy by design · Cloud data ecosystems · Roadmapping · Influencing executives
Full skill definitions on SFIA ↗Senior Software Developer → Data Architect2 levels up
Skills and experience you bring
Little direct overlap on paper, which makes framing everything: your Software Engineering experience still carries judgement, delivery and credibility a job title can't show.
The gap to close or reframe
- ○ Enterprise data architecture
- ○ Integration patterns
- ○ Governance and privacy by design
- ○ Cloud data ecosystems
- ○ Roadmapping
- ○ Influencing executives
How to position what you have
You're crossing from Software Engineering into Data & Analytics. Lead with the bridge: the parts of your current work that already touch data & analytics , and frame the rest as proven ability to master a domain, because you've done exactly that once already. Don't hide the gaps; name them as your development edge and show what you're already doing about them. Then bring this to your AFQY CV review and we'll work the framing together.
Part of your AFQY membership
My Future Role is an add-on for AFQY members. It sits alongside CV review, where an AFQY reviewer works through your CV with you line by line, and the wider community of New Zealand tech people who have already made the move you are weighing up. Your CV is read only when you press the button, and only you and the AFQY team can see what comes back.
Want a person rather than a tool? Ourmentorsare retired CIOs who have walked these paths and have nothing to sell.