Scope for Growth – Career Conversations – South East Leadership Academy

1. Career Conversations and the Talent Lifecycle

Everyone’s career journeys matter. Great career conversations help explore ambitions, unlock new opportunities, and find the right support at every stage of a health and care career journey.

A career conversation is a meaningful discussion between an employee and another party – most often a manager -about aspects of their career which the individual feels is of significant positive value.

Career conversations are a critical component of the talent lifecycle, ensuring that staff receive the guidance, support, and opportunities they need to grow and thrive. They should not be one-off discussions but rather ongoing, structured conversations that help individuals navigate their careers.

The talent lifecycle consists of:

Attraction and Recruitment – Career conversations can help new hires understand how they can grow within the organisation.
Onboarding and Development – Early discussions about strengths and aspirations set the foundation for long-term career success.
Talent Identification and Succession Planning – Structured conversations help identify high-potential staff and prepare them for future leadership roles.
Retention and Career Mobility – Engaging conversations ensure staff feel valued, reducing turnover and improving staff wellbeing.
Leadership Transitions and Exit Planning – Supporting staff in their next career steps, whether within the NHS or beyond.

2. Introducing the Scope for Growth – career conversation model

Scope for Growth – career conversations are a new approach to supporting personal growth and developing talent right across health and care. The model is designed to provide a framework for high-quality, inclusive career conversations that help draw out an individual’s aspirations as well as their potential.

The Scope for Growth framework is a person-centred, inclusive approach designed to support career conversations and leadership development. It enables individuals to explore their aspirations, strengths, and development needs while helping organisations identify and nurture talent.

Scope for Growth helps you have meaningful conversations about aspirations and future opportunities—so that colleagues can have career agency.

How Does It Work?

Career conversations can happen at any stage and should feel positive, supportive, and practical. They help explore:

🌟 What you enjoy and where your strengths lie.
📈 Where you see your career going and how to get there.
💡 Opportunities to purposefully develop new skills or take on new roles.

No matter where colleagues are in their career, these conversations can help growth.

By embedding Scope for Growth into career conversations, organisations can proactively manage talent, improve workforce retention, and strengthen leadership capacity across the NHS.

3. Learning from South East Scope for Growth pilot sites

During 2023/2024 South East organisations and systems piloted the Scope for Growth model. Scope for Growth was implemented in different ways:

woven into existing appraisal conversations (most common)
an independent in-depth career conversation
an assessment tool for learning development opportunities
part of the application process for talent pools

The pilot sites consider the following were some of the benefits:

Encouraged excitement in staff about their careers and future opportunities
Increased capability and confidence among career conversation facilitators and line managers in holding ‘good’ conversations.
It enabled staff members to find new opportunities and develop their career.
Proactive seeking of purposeful development opportunities by staff.
The structured conversation enabling participants to articulate their goals and take action.

The pilot sites were clear that certain steps were required to ensure successful implementation.

4. Organisational and system benefits

Potential benefits for organisations are:

common standards and a unified and consistent view on talent within and across systems that mobilises the many, rather than a special few
a better understanding of the workforce’s talent, aspirations, and skill sets, and a clear understanding of how they can support everyone on their specific career journey
improved visibility of internal talent pipelines and talent pools at all levels across the service
stronger, more diverse pipelines into critical senior leadership roles and more opportunity to share talent between organisations, allowing for better integration and person-centred care
increased levels of engagement and motivation among all our people at a time when we are faced with an immense challenge to overcome

5. Bringing Scope for Growth into Your Organisation or system

Thinking about using Scope for Growth? We’re here to help! Whether you’re looking to learn more, start small or embed it fully in your organisation, we offer practical consultancy support to help you

✔ Embed career conversations into existing processes and infrastructure—like appraisals or talent programmes.
✔ Align opportunities to local workforce needs.
✔ Improve talent visibility and succession planning. (when uploaded to link to Succession Planning and TIMA pages)?

📩 Get in touch: england.setalentandleadership@nhs.net

Join our Community of Practice

To connect, learn, work through issues and share best practices, join our Scope for Growth South East Community of Practice. This network brings together: Talent, Leadership, HR and OD professionals exploring and embedding career conversations. It’s an informal space and the agenda is led by the community.

📅 Our next virtual session: 21 May 2025 at 1pm
📩 Join us by emailing: england.setalentandleadership@nhs.net

Useful materials

For more information read the Overview Guidance document or join the community on the FutureNHS Platform. This platform is our national online workspace, where people share ideas, resources, and real-world experiences to help each other make career conversations meaningful.

NHS Futures site workspace has been developed and organised to reflect the phases of implementation that organisations may follow when beginning their journey with Scope for Growth.

The workspace supports NHS people leading on talent within their organisations to come together to share best practice approaches to adopting and implementing the Scope for Growth – career conversations framework. It facilitates sharing of useful resources to support and encourage adoption of the framework, case studies, updates on use of the approach across the NHS and much more.