Ask how someone got promoted last quarter and you will get a story, not a record. The training was completed in the LMS. The practical sign-off lives in a manager's notebook. The certification is a PDF in an email. The approval happened in a meeting. The level change was typed into the HRIS three weeks later by someone who was not in the meeting. Five systems, one thread, and no single place where the sequence exists.
That is why progression runs on advocacy. When the evidence is scattered, the person with the most persuasive manager moves first. The person with the strongest record but a quiet manager waits. Nobody designed it that way. It is what happens when a multi-step process has no owner and no rail.
What Journeys Does
Journeys gives that process a rail. An administrator defines an ordered sequence of steps, and a person moves through it automatically as each step is satisfied. Step two only becomes active once step one is done. Every step is logged, with a date and a name, on a single Activity Page.
Five step types cover the progression case end to end.
| Step | What it does | Who acts |
|---|---|---|
| Training Completion | Enrolls the person once 100% of the required training for a target career is approved. Always the first step. | Nobody. The record does the work. |
| Manager Approval | Routes a decision to the person's direct manager by email and Inbox. | The manager, from the Activity Page. |
| Custom Approval | Routes to a named approver, or to any administrator case by case. | The approver, or an admin who can reassign. |
| Assign Career/Level | Adds the new career or level to the person. Never removes an existing one. | Nobody. Runs on completion of the prior step. |
| Notification | Sends a link to the Activity Page to the people who need to know. | Nobody. Fires and moves on. |
The steps run strictly in order. If an approval is not given, the journey stalls on that step and waits. Nothing rolls back, nothing skips ahead, and the stall is visible to every administrator on the Journeys list.
One Technician, Level 2 to Level 3
A field service organization defines the Level 3 technician career with its required training: high-voltage isolation, the vendor's advanced diagnostics course, and the site safety refresher. A Level 2 technician finishes the last of the three and her training approvals go through.
That same day she is enrolled. Her regional manager gets an email and an Inbox item linking to her Activity Page, where he sees the three approved training records and the dates behind them. He approves. The operations director, set as the fixed approver on the next step, does the same. The Level 3 career is added to her profile, and the HR business partner and the scheduling lead receive a notification with the link.
The whole sequence is on one page: who approved, when, and on what evidence. Nobody chased anyone. Nobody typed a level change from memory.
What It Does Not Do
Journeys does not decide. Every promotion still passes through a human approval, and the platform will not advance a person past that step on its own. What changes is the quality of the decision in front of the manager. Instead of a recommendation in an email, he is looking at the dated record that the criteria were met.
It also does not reach backward. If a training record later expires, a completed journey stays completed. Progression is a decision made on the evidence at the time, and the log preserves that.
How to Start
Journeys builds on the SkillsDB primitives you already have. If a career has required training defined, it can be the enrollment condition. Add the approval steps your organization actually uses, add the career or level to grant, activate, and the first eligible person enrolls the moment their training is approved. The Career Frameworks feature holds the careers and required training; the reference entry on promotion workflows covers how to write the criteria themselves.
Admins can create Journeys now under Company in the sidebar (Company > Journeys). If you do not see it, talk to your account team to turn it on. We'll be adding may more journeys, but if there is something in particular you'd like to see, please let us know.
Progression was always a sequence. Now it has a place to live. Please