The Employee Trajectory tab is where Compass really earns its keep. Where Reviews shows you a single cycle in detail, Trajectory shows you how employees are moving across cycles — accelerating, holding steady, declining — and synthesises that movement into archetypes, readiness signals, and risk patterns.
The Overview is the executive read of all that.
What this page answers
Across multiple review cycles: how is the cohort progressing? What archetypes dominate? Where are the persistent strengths, the emerging risks, the readiness clusters?
Before the page works
Trajectory requires Compass to have analysed at least two primary-classified review cycles for each employee. New employees won’t appear; people with only minimal reviews won’t appear. If you’ve just turned on PI for the first time, the Trajectory tab will be thin until at least one more cycle’s worth of data lands.
What’s on the page
Two headline KPIs
Cycles Compared — Count of cycles included in the synthesis
Trajectories Analysed — Count of employees who have a trajectory record (i.e., who had 2+ primary reviews)
Trajectory distribution
A bar chart showing the count of employees in each trajectory direction:
Accelerating — Performance level improving across cycles
Steady — Holding at a level — the most common direction, and not negative in itself
Declining — Performance level trending down
There is no separate “plateauing” direction — being stuck with unresolved gaps is captured by the Stalled archetype below.
This is the headline cross-cycle pattern of the firm.
Archetype distribution
A bar chart of the eight archetypes Compass uses to characterise people:
Rising Star — Accelerating, currently strong/exceptional
Emerging — Accelerating from a lower base — starting to break out
Pillar — Steady at strong/exceptional — the consistent high performer
Solid Core — Steady at solid — the reliable middle
Cooling — Still strong, but declining — the early-warning archetype
Stalled — Steady, with persistent actionable gaps that aren’t closing
Volatile — Direction keeps alternating across cycles
At Risk — Declining, stuck at a concerning level, or risk-heavy
Archetype is a richer signal than trajectory alone because it combines movement and level.
Transition directions
A stacked-percent bar chart showing, for each cycle-pair, what proportion of employees moved each direction (improving / stable / declining). Useful for spotting whether the firm is improving or eroding over time.
Trajectory × Readiness
A heatmap with trajectory on one axis and progression readiness on the other (readiness spans Insufficient Data through Ready Now). Accelerating × Ready Now is your promotion-ready stars; Accelerating × Not Ready is your high-potential coaching candidates — trending right but not there yet. Ready Now against a Declining trajectory usually means someone was ready but is now slipping — often a retention conversation.
Risk trajectory
A bar chart of the count of employees by risk direction (increasing, stable, decreasing, new, none). A cycle where most people are in “none”, “stable” or “decreasing” is healthy; one where “increasing” or “new” dominates is concerning.
Enduring strengths
A bar chart of the top 10 strengths that have appeared across multiple cycles. These are the things the firm is durably good at — not a one-cycle hot streak.
Trajectory signals
A table of the AI-detected flags across the cohort. Signal types include:
Persistent Gap — Same gap, multiple cycles
New Risk — Risk that just appeared
Skill Regression — A skill that was strong is now weaker
Development Working — A gap from a prior cycle is now resolved
Sentiment Decline — Sentiment trending down
Performance Decline — Performance dropping cycle-over-cycle
Reviewer Quality Drop — Their reviewer’s writing has degraded
Role Change — A change in role visible in the data
Plus other flags Compass picks up. Each row is a specific signal — e.g. “Persistent Gap: Delegation (3 cycles)” — with the number of employees affected, capped at the top 15.
Where the data comes from
The whole Trajectory tab is built from the trajectory synthesis job. Compass takes every extraction record for an employee, sorts them by cycle, and produces:
Trajectory direction
Archetype
Progression readiness
Risk trajectory
Persistent and resolved gaps, plus new concerns
Development effectiveness (effective / mixed / ineffective)
Persistent strengths
Trajectory flags (the list above)
Arc summary (a short narrative of the arc)
These signals only exist for employees with 2+ primary-classified reviews — Compass needs at least two data points to identify a direction.
How to read it
Read trajectory distribution first. It’s the firm’s “are we getting better?” answer. A cohort dominated by Accelerating + Steady is in good shape.
Then look at archetypes. A firm with lots of Rising Star + Pillar is one story; a firm with lots of Stalled + Volatile is another.
Trajectory × Readiness is where succession and growth decisions live. Promotions should mostly come from the top-right quadrant.
Trajectory signals (the table) is where individual stories surface. Filter or scan for Skill Regression and New Risk especially — these are early-warning signals worth investigating.
Tips
You don’t pick cycles here. Unlike Compare Reviews, Trajectory has no cycle picker — it automatically covers all completed cycles with extractions, because the synthesis is per-employee rather than per-cycle.
Read the Compass AI insights card. It generates an AI-written narrative of the cohort’s trajectory story the first time you open the page — the “in plain language, what’s happening here?” version. The narrative is saved; use the regenerate control on the card to refresh it after new analysis lands.
Don’t expect cycle-to-cycle Trajectory to be stable. Trajectory updates whenever new extraction arrives. A cycle-on-cycle shift in archetype distribution is real signal — pay attention to it.