Review your team's career aspirations

What this achieves

When someone declares where they want their career to go, that declaration waits for a response from their manager. Reviewing it records an outcome and your reasoning, both of which the employee reads.

Required role: Administrator or Manager. A manager sees their direct reports; an administrator sees everyone.

Steps

Go to Career & Growth → Aspirations.
Find the person under My team, or use All aspirations if you are an administrator.
Select Review.
Read the Target, the Timeframe, and the Employee notes.
Under Your review, choose a Review status.
Enter your Review notes. These are required.
Select Submit Review.

Review statuses

Option	Description
Supported	The aspiration is one the company will back.
Needs Discussion	Not a no. Something has to be talked through before it can be supported.
Not Aligned	The aspiration does not match what is available or what the person is currently placed to do.

Needs Discussion exists so that a real conversation does not have to be forced into a yes or a no. Use it when the honest answer is “not like this” or “not yet”, and then have the conversation.

Example: James Whitfield names a senior engineering role within a year. Olivia Bennett marks it Needs Discussion because the route is right but the timeframe is not, and says so in her notes.

The employee reads your notes

This is the part to be clear about before you type. The employee sees the review on their own aspiration screen: your name as the reviewer, the review status, and the review notes exactly as you wrote them. They are then asked to acknowledge that they have read it.

Review notes are required for that reason. A status on its own tells somebody the answer without telling them why, which is the worst version of this exchange.

Example: recording Not Aligned with no explanation tells James Whitfield he has been turned down and nothing else. Recording it with two sentences on what the role currently requires gives him something he can act on.

What the list shows

Option	Description
Employee	Who declared the aspiration.
Target	The role, position, or free-text description they named.
Timeframe	How soon they are aiming for it.
Status	Where the aspiration is in its own lifecycle.
Submitted	When they submitted it.
Department	The employee’s department. Shown on the administrator-wide list.

Administrators can narrow the company-wide list by status and by timeframe, and clear the filters again.

Aspiration statuses

Option	Description
Draft	Saved by the employee but not sent. Not visible for review.
Submitted	Sent for review.
Under Review	Being looked at.
Reviewed	A review has been recorded.
Acknowledged	The employee has confirmed they read the review.
Withdrawn	The employee has taken it back.

A review can lock

Once an aspiration is acknowledged or withdrawn, the review is locked and cannot be modified. The panel says which of the two happened and shows the most recent review on record.

An employee who edits their aspiration resubmits it, which starts the exchange again rather than editing your review.

What happens next

A supported aspiration is the starting point for a development plan aimed at that target role, and the employee can create or link one from their own aspiration screen. Beyond the individual, aspirations are a demand signal: several people naming the same target role tells you where to aim development spending, and it is information you would otherwise only get at a resignation.