A career path for innovators inside the organisation

An internal career path for innovators sets out the roles people can grow into, what each role is responsible for, and what evidence shows someone is ready for the next one. Without it, your best practitioners face a choice between going back to their old job or leaving. With it, innovation becomes a profession inside the organisation rather than a temporary assignment.

The common pattern is familiar. Someone is seconded to the innovation team, learns to research, facilitate and test, does excellent work for two years, and then discovers there is no grade, title or next step for what they now do. They return to a line role where the new skills go unused, or they take them to a consultancy. Designing a path is how you stop paying to train people for someone else.

What a career path for innovators has to solve

Before drafting levels, be clear about the problems the path must fix:

• Invisibility. Innovation work is collaborative and much of it is preparation, synthesis and facilitation. If progression depends on owning a launched product, most of the real contribution is never seen.
• The management trap. In many organisations the only way up is to manage people. Strong practitioners become weak managers because there was no other door.
• Temporary status. Secondments and "champion" roles signal that innovation is a side activity. People treat it accordingly.
• Mismatched expectations. HR sees a project role; the person sees a profession. The path makes the profession explicit.

Step by step: designing the path

1. Start with the work, not the titles. List what your innovation activity actually requires over a year: framing problems, research, facilitation, prototyping and testing, portfolio and governance, partnerships, coaching others. Talk to the people doing it. A stakeholder map of who relies on the team helps you see the roles that already exist informally.

2. Group the work into a small number of role families. Three or four is usually enough. A workable set:

   • Practitioner track: people who run the methods, such as researchers, facilitators and designers.
   • Initiative lead track: people who carry an idea from concept to a working initiative and into operations.
   • Portfolio and governance track: people who manage the pipeline, funding decisions, measurement and reporting.
   • Ecosystem track: people who run challenges, partnerships with startups, universities and other entities. Not every organisation needs all four. A small team may start with one practitioner track and add others as the work grows.

3. Define three to four levels per track by scope, not by seniority. Describe each level by what the person is trusted with:

   • Contributing: applies methods well inside a project someone else frames.
   • Leading: frames and runs a project or a workshop series end to end.
   • Shaping: designs how the organisation approaches a class of problems, and develops others.
   • Setting direction: influences strategy and portfolio choices across units. Keep each description to a few lines. Long competency dictionaries get filed and forgotten.

4. Make the senior practitioner level equal to a management role. Give the "shaping" and "setting direction" practitioner levels the same grade band as managing a team. This dual ladder is the single change that keeps your strongest practitioners practising. Work this through with HR early; grading rules are usually the slowest part.

5. Describe the evidence for each level. Readiness should be shown through work, not asserted in a form. Useful evidence includes: problems framed and how they changed the project, sessions facilitated, tests designed and what was learned, initiatives handed into operations, people coached. Ask people to keep a simple running record of what they contributed and to whom. A KPI tree can help connect individual contributions to the outcomes the organisation tracks, without turning them into a personal score.

6. Decide progression with peers, not by ranking. A short panel reviews a person's record against the level description and asks: is this person consistently working at the next scope? It is a yes, a not yet with specific gaps, or a conversation to continue. No forced distribution, no league table and no comparison between colleagues. Innovation depends on people sharing credit; ranking them against each other teaches them to stop.

7. Build movement in both directions. The path should allow people to rotate into operations to carry an initiative they built, and allow line staff to join for a cycle and return. Write rotations into the design so that leaving the innovation team is a step in a career, not an exit from it.

8. Pair each level with a development route. For every step up, name what practice gets someone there: leading a project with a coach, running a workshop series, taking an initiative through handover, mentoring a newer colleague. Use a roadmapping session with each person to plan their next twelve months.

9. Review the path once a year. Run a retrospective with the people on it. Which levels are clear? Where do people get stuck? Which work is still invisible? Adjust the descriptions; the first version will be wrong in places.

Illustrative example: a regional health service

Illustrative. A regional health service in Scotland has run an improvement and innovation team for four years, staffed mostly by clinicians and administrators on two-year secondments. Turnover at the end of each secondment means the team relearns the same methods every cycle.

The team's director works with HR to define two tracks: practitioner and initiative lead, each with three levels. The top practitioner level sits in the same pay band as a service manager. Each level has five lines describing scope and a list of acceptable evidence. Staff keep a contribution record: which problems they framed, which sessions they ran, which tests they designed, which initiatives they handed to wards.

The first progression panel meets six months later. Two people move up; three receive a "not yet" with named gaps and a development plan. Nobody is compared to anyone else. A senior nurse who had planned to return to the ward after her secondment applies for a permanent practitioner role instead, and a ward manager joins the team for one cycle to carry a discharge-planning initiative into his own ward.

Do's and don'ts

Do

• Design the path around the work your team actually does.
• Create a senior practitioner level equal in grade to management.
• Base progression on a record of contribution that people keep themselves.
• Let people move between the innovation team and operations without losing standing.
• Keep level descriptions short enough to be read in one sitting.

Don't

• Don't rank people against each other or use forced distributions. It destroys the shared credit innovation depends on.
• Don't require a "launched product" for promotion. Most valuable contribution happens before and around launch.
• Don't copy a competency framework from another sector without testing it on your own roles.
• Don't leave the path to the innovation team alone. Without HR, it will not survive the next restructure.
• Don't treat secondment as the only way in.

Questions people ask

What job titles are used for innovation roles? Titles vary widely: innovation manager, service designer, design researcher, innovation lead, portfolio manager, partnerships lead. The title matters less than the scope behind it. Define the scope for each level first, then choose titles that fit your organisation's grading conventions.

How do I keep innovation staff from leaving? Give them somewhere to grow without becoming managers, recognise contribution that is not attached to a launch, and let them carry their initiatives into operations. People mostly leave when the next step is invisible.

How do you evaluate innovators without a score? Compare each person's record of work with the description of the level, not with colleagues. A peer panel decides whether they are consistently working at the next scope and names specific gaps if not.

Where to go next

A career path is one part of a wider capability plan; see how to build innovation capability in your team. The evidence a path relies on is covered in how to recognise who contributed what, without rankings, and the skills each level grows are set out in the 6 skills behind every good innovation team. Useful method guides: RACI, KPI tree, roadmapping and retrospective.