Assign a stretch assignment

What this achieves

A stretch assignment is a piece of work given to somebody deliberately because of what doing it will teach them. It is offered rather than allocated: the employee accepts or declines it, and what they got out of it is recorded at the end.

Required role: Administrator or Manager.

Steps

Go to Career & Growth → Stretch Assignments.
Under Team assignments, select Create assignment.
Choose the Employee.
Enter the Title.

Example: Lead the onboarding redesign.
Write the Description, covering goals, scope, and expectations.
Set the Start date and the End date.
Pick the Target skills and Target competencies the assignment should build.
Choose a Linked development plan, or leave it as No linked plan.
Save the assignment.

Naming the target skills is the point

An assignment with no target skills is only work. Naming the skills and competencies it is meant to build is what makes it developmental, and it is what lets you check afterwards whether it did.

Example: giving James Whitfield the onboarding redesign at HC Corp UK Ltd and naming stakeholder management as a target skill states why he is doing it rather than somebody faster. Without that, it reads as workload.

The employee decides

An assignment arrives as a proposal. The employee accepts or declines it from their own My assignments list, and a decline can carry a reason that stays on the record.

Option	Description
Proposed	Offered. Waiting for the employee to respond.
Accepted	The employee has taken it on.
In Progress	Started.
Completed	Finished, with an outcome recorded.
Declined	The employee has turned it down.

Treat a decline as information rather than a problem. It usually means capacity, and the reason field is where that gets said once instead of being inferred.

Running the assignment

The employee moves it forward from their own list. Start puts it in progress; Update progress records progress notes as it goes; Complete asks what was learned or achieved before closing it.

The completion outcome is the part that matters six months later. An assignment closed without one leaves you knowing the work happened and nothing about what it built.

Example: completing the onboarding redesign with two sentences on what James Whitfield ran and what he would do differently makes it usable evidence in a later promotion case. Closing it silently does not.

Linking to a development plan

Linking an assignment to a development plan ties the work to the growth it belongs to, and the assignment then offers a link straight through to the plan.

Link it whenever the plan already exists. An assignment sitting on its own is easy to lose track of; one attached to a plan is looked at every time the plan is reviewed.

What the team list shows

Option	Description
Employee	Who the assignment is for.
Title	What the assignment is.
Status	Where it has got to.
Target skills	The skills it is meant to build.
Start	When it begins.
End	When it is due to finish.

Filter by status to find what is waiting. A team list full of Proposed rows means assignments are being offered and not answered, which is a conversation rather than a system problem.

What happens next

A completed assignment stays on record with its outcome, its target skills, and who assigned it. It is evidence of experience rather than a change to anyone’s skill levels — those still come from assessment, so a skill the assignment built should be reassessed for it to show up in readiness or a gap report.