The instruments that turn 60 days of lessons into a role-winning portfolio: a readiness scorecard, weekly pass/fail gates, and your first-90-days plan
The 12-week track builds the craft and the operation. This layer measures whether you can actually walk into the role — and makes the gaps visible while you still have time to close them. Score yourself honestly at the start, work the track, then score again at the end. The delta is your proof.
On Day 1, set the toggle to Baseline and score every competency where you are today. Don't inflate it — a low baseline is a bigger story later. As you finish each week, flip its portfolio gate to passed only when it genuinely meets the criterion. On Day 60, switch to Now, re-score, and read the delta. Everything saves in your browser.
Fifteen competencies a Human Data Lead is hired on — the craft, the operation, and the executive polish. Rate each 1 (never done it) to 5 (could lead it tomorrow).
Below 45 now: you're a strong evaluator — keep building the operation and polish rows. 45–60: lead-ready for an IC-heavy lead role; rehearse the stakeholder and governance answers. 60+: interview as a lead without apology — your binder backs every row.
Don't measure progress in days watched — measure it in artifacts that pass a bar. Each week has one gate. Flip it to passed only when the artifact would survive a stranger's review. Twelve green gates is your portfolio.
The last artifact looks forward, not back. A director hiring a lead wants to know what you'd do in the first three months. This is the template — fill the right column with the specifics of the team you're joining.
| Window | Focus | Your concrete first move |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–30 | Listen + measure | Audit current label quality (agreement, gold accuracy); read the existing guidelines; meet the annotators and the researchers you serve. Change nothing yet. |
| Days 31–60 | Fix the highest-leverage gap | Pick the one guideline or pipeline gap with the worst quality cost; rewrite it, recalibrate the team, measure the lift with a number. |
| Days 61–90 | Stand up the heartbeat | Make quality measurable every week: a standing QA audit + drift alerts and a calibration cadence. Ship the first weekly quality report upward. |
Modern lead interviews increasingly probe data governance. Add one line to your 90-day plan: "Within 90 days, produce a data-governance one-pager — representativeness, bias checks, provenance, and retention — mapped to the EU AI Act's data requirements." It signals you think past throughput. The Governance briefing gives you the checklist to back it.
The six areas that separate a lead from a senior evaluator. Each is a focused briefing with templates you can lift straight into your portfolio. Work them alongside the week they map to.
The hands-on weeks run on the lab's synthetic practice dataset — 6 prompt-adherence image pairs with a gold answer key, preference export, and two simulated annotators for the agreement exercise. Open it, score it, argue with it.