Submit your career aspirations

What this achieves

A career aspiration is where you say what you are aiming for, so your manager can respond to it rather than guess. Submitting one sends it for review and gets you a recorded answer with reasons.

Required role: Any signed-in user.

Steps

Go to Career & Growth → Aspirations.
Select Define My Aspirations.
Under Where do you want to grow?, set at least one target.
Choose a Timeframe.
Add your Motivations, pressing Enter after each one.
Under Logistics, set Willing to relocate, your Travel preference, and your Work style preference.
Add any Notes.
Select Save as Draft if you are not finished, or Submit.
Confirm the submission.

Naming a target

You need at least one target, and there are four ways to give one. The form will not let you submit without any of them.

Option	Description
Target Job Profile	A role your company has defined. The most useful option, because readiness can be measured against it.
Target Position	A specific post rather than a kind of role.
Target Role	A target role chosen from the list.
Other	Free text, for when your target is not in the system.

Prefer a job profile where one fits. A named profile is something you can be scored against and something a development plan can be aimed at. Free text says what you want, but nothing can be measured against it.

Example: James Whitfield names a senior engineering job profile rather than typing “something more senior”. The first produces a readiness score and a gap list; the second produces a conversation that has to start from nothing.

Timeframe

Option	Description
Within 6 months	Soon.
Within 1 year	Within the year.
Within 2 years	Medium term.
3+ years	Long term.
No specific timeline	A direction rather than a date.

No specific timeline is a real answer, not a cop-out. A direction with no date is easier to support than a date nobody can commit to.

Motivations and logistics

Motivations are short tags saying what is driving this — the reason behind the target, not the target itself.

The logistics section tells your company what you are open to: whether you would relocate, how much travel suits you, and whether you want office-based, remote, or hybrid work. That is information they would otherwise only find out by offering you something you turn down.

Example: recording that you are willing to relocate and open to occasional travel means an opportunity in Manchester reaches you instead of being ruled out on somebody’s assumption.

Submitting sends it to your manager

The confirmation says what happens: once submitted, your manager is notified to review your aspirations. Nothing happens while it is a draft.

Reading the review

When your manager has reviewed it, the review appears on your own aspiration: who reviewed it, the review outcome, and their notes. You are then asked to Acknowledge that you have read it.

Option	Description
Supported	Your company will back this aspiration.
Needs Discussion	Not a refusal. Something needs talking through first.
Not Aligned	The aspiration does not match what is currently available or where you are placed.

Acknowledging locks the review. If you want to change your aspiration afterwards, edit it — but editing resubmits it for review, and the form warns you before you do.

Withdrawing

Withdraw takes the aspiration back, and the confirmation is explicit: your manager will no longer see it for review. Use it when your thinking has genuinely changed rather than as a way to avoid an answer you did not want.

Turning it into a plan

From your aspiration you can create a development plan aimed at it, or link one you already have. A linked plan can be opened straight from the aspiration and unlinked again.

Link one. An aspiration on its own is a statement; an aspiration with a plan attached is the thing that actually moves.

Who sees your aspiration

Your manager sees it once you submit it, which is the point of submitting. Administrators can see aspirations across the company, which is how the People team spots several people aiming at the same role and aims development spending at it.

What happens next

A supported aspiration is the starting point for a development plan and for readiness scoring against the target role. Your readiness screen marks your declared aspiration in its role picker, so the comparison you care about is one selection away rather than something you have to set up again.