Everything you need to know to enable more internal mobility in your organization – for knowledge transfer, employee retention, and more.
Developing an internal mobility program can bring a wealth of benefits – boosting growth, employee engagement, and overall business performance.
And while organizations have traditionally looked outside to fill new roles, today's skill shortages mean that external talent acquisition isn’t always cutting it anymore. To truly grow and thrive, it's time to focus on developing the talent you already have.
However, despite the clear benefits of internal mobility, Deloitte found that only 6 percent of businesses rate themselves as ‘excellent at moving people from role to role’, with 59 percent rating themselves fair or inadequate.
We’re here to help you change that – with practical steps to create a rock-solid internal mobility strategy – and best practices for enabling internal mobility.
Internal mobility is when existing staff take on new roles in your organization. They might be moving sideways into a different role at a similar level, moving up the ladder with a promotion, or moving between project teams.
Whatever the reason or type of move, internal mobility delivers many business benefits, including staff retention, upskilling, knowledge transfer, engagement, and lots more.
When you think of internal mobility, you probably think of promotions - but upwards isn’t the only valuable way to move in an organization. Much like chess, there’s no single route to success. Rather, there are combinations of different moves that can help you – or your business – advance.
A lateral move is when someone moves to a different role in the organization but at the same level. Perhaps because they want a new challenge or to pivot their career in a different direction.
Lateral moves can expose people to different areas of the business and help expand their skill set. Although it may not be the primary intention, they prepare someone to step up to more responsibility later by strengthening their expertise and overall understanding of the organization.
Plus it doesn’t just upskill the individual. Lateral moves boost knowledge transfer and cross-departmental understanding in the new team when employees share insights from their previous positions.
Like lateral moves, a cross-functional move involves an employee transferring to another team. But often with a more strategic purpose than simply a change of role.
Cross-functional moves typically see an employee moving to a different team – for example, from product development to marketing – to build a more holistic understanding of the business, often with succession planning in mind.
For the business, cross-functional moves enhance collaboration and innovation by bringing different areas of expertise together. They also help create well-rounded internal candidates to fill core vacancies in the future.
A promotion is when someone moves to a higher-level role with increased responsibilities and authority, usually matched by an increase in pay and benefits.
Promotions are a key motivator for employees – encouraging high engagement and hard work – and supporting employee retention. Promoting from within can enhance morale across the organization, as employees see clear pathways for their own advancement – particularly if promotions are based on merit rather than favoritism.
They also benefit the business by reducing the cost of hiring expensive external talent, by retaining the employee’s accumulated knowledge and reducing the learning curve in new roles.
Project-based moves involve dynamic resource allocation, assigning employees to different teams to work on specific projects.
This allows businesses to assemble the best project team to deliver positive project and client outcomes, ensuring the right mix of skills and expertise for each unique challenge. Plus, project-based moves improve resource utilization rates, supporting higher productivity and profitability for the business by making the most effective use of available talent.
For employees, working on diverse projects offers valuable on-the-job learning opportunities, skill development, and networking opportunities, which – in turn – also benefit the business. They also support staff engagement, satisfaction, and retention by providing diverse experiences.
Productivity, engagement, utilization, cross-functional awareness, succession planning… we’ve already touched on lots of the benefits of internal talent mobility above. Here’s a starter for ten, before we move on to how you can make internal mobility happen in your business.
Internal moves that develop the knowledge and experience of your employees is one of the best ways to maximize your human capital (McKinsey and Co).
Internal mobility between project teams increases resource utilization rates, reducing the time resources are idle – burning money instead of earning it.
Organizations can leverage existing talent to fill skills gaps and meet strategic needs quickly, without the delays and costs associated with external hiring.
Employees gain a broader set of skills and experiences by moving across different functions, increasing their value to the organization.
Internal mobility helps build adaptable teams with the right mix of skills and experience for specific projects – delivering better outcomes and happier stakeholders.
Employees moving between projects and departments helps transfer knowledge and best practices, which can boost performance across multiple teams.
Cross-departmental moves and promotions can shape future leaders, ensuring a strong future talent pipeline for strategic roles.
Internal mobility boosts employee engagement, morale, and motivation by providing clear growth opportunities and aligning their role to their long-term career plans.
Internal mobility aligns talent with business needs – proactively positioning people in places where they can most benefit the business.
Promoting from within reduces the need for external hires, lowering recruitment, onboarding, and training expenses – and reducing the learning curve in new roles.
Internal hires get up to speed faster than external hires in new roles, due to their familiarity with the company's processes and culture.
Progression and upskilling opportunities help people feel valued and see a future with your business, which can reduce costly employee turnover.
Now you know the main types of internal mobility and its benefits, let's get to why you’re really here – expert tips on how to create an internal mobility program that gets people moving in your organization.
Meaningful, beneficial internal mobility doesn’t happen by chance. You’ll get some organic movement as employees make moves that suit their career needs. But to truly leverage the organizational benefits of strategic workforce planning, you need a talent mobility strategy: one that communicates the benefits of mobility, the rationale, and the mechanisms you’ll use to support it – more on these below.
It's important that your internal mobility strategy is aligned to your organizational workforce strategy and has senior leadership support. Some internal mobility decisions may not be popular, so a clear rationale and senior champion can be valuable. For example, project managers may need help seeing the bigger picture if they request a senior resource but have a junior resource assigned in order to upskill them.
To keep your talent mobility strategy relevant and aligned with business needs, create an advisory board composed of leaders from various departments. They can advise on emerging workforce needs, upcoming internal opportunities, and internal candidates who may be suitable. Plus, discuss employees’ career development plans and identify high-potential talent for leadership tracks. The board will also help champion and prioritize internal mobility with the senior management team.
Sometimes businesses have barriers to internal mobility – they might just not realize it. Survey your workforce to understand their experience of your internal mobility process and identify any pain points (like lack of awareness of opportunities, unclear application procedures, fear of their manager’s reaction, etc.) Then use this feedback to remove those barriers.
Deloitte research found the top barriers to internal mobility are:
We have tips to tackle all of these below 😇
If you’re using internal mobility for succession planning and strategic workforce management, it makes sense to invest in people whose ambitions align with your business needs.
To do this, you need to understand what people’s career ambitions are. This requires a mechanism for people to talk about where they want to be in five years' time and what they need to get there – as well as capacity planning to identify hiring needs and prepare for future business demand.
To match existing employees to emerging opportunities, you also need to know what skills they have – and skills gaps you need to fill. To support this, you’ll need to create and maintain a skills inventory. This should include details of every employee, their current skills and proficiency, project experiences, and career aspirations.
Once you’ve mapped your organizational skill set, you can conduct a skills gaps analysis to understand where you need to upskill, reskill, or cross-train individuals to optimize their opportunities in the organization. Read more on effective skills management.
Effective resource management is about allocating people to projects based on their skills, availability, and – in forward-thinking companies – their career development needs. Businesses that schedule resources dynamically can increase productivity, reduce idle time, and improve project outcomes. Plus upskilling employees for future demand.
Internal moves don’t have to be forever. You can create temporary opportunities to give people a taste of new jobs without giving up the security of their existing roles. Create opportunities for people to join special projects and cross-functional task forces. Or create rotational programs that let employees work in different departments for a fixed period. They’ll get to explore new options in the business and develop new skills too.
To ensure career progression for your existing talent, create clear pathways through the business – whether that’s upskilling through role to role mobility or climbing the corporate ladder through upward mobility.
Be completely transparent about the skills and competencies needed to progress. By outlining specific requirements and expectations, employees can clearly see what is needed for them to advance, helping them step up those rungs with confidence.
One of the easiest ways to improve internal mobility is to promote them to current employees and encourage them to apply. Create a space where everyone knows to look for opportunities – such as an intranet page, weekly email, internal job fairs – and ensure the criteria and competencies are crystal clear. Encourage internal talent to talk to their managers about applying – and encourage managers to be supportive, even if they’re reluctant to lose a team member – see best practices below.
When using internal mobility for workforce development, it’s important to provide targeted training to equip people with in-demand skills – both for current and future needs. Create training programs that let people learn about different areas of the business and gain new skills for new roles in the organization. And establish a mentoring program that can pair ambitious employees with relevant mentors to support their growth and mobility in the business.
Matching people to opportunities is complex, especially in a dynamic business environment. Fortunately, there are plenty of software solutions to share the strain. A resource management tool can track employee skills, experiences, and career aspirations, so you can match employees with suitable internal opportunities. They also offer dynamic resource scheduling to match the right resources to the right projects at the right time.
Data makes every decision better, so use available analytics to inform your internal mobility decisions. For example, analyze workforce data or use predictive analytics to identify emerging demand that internal mobility could meet. And look at utilization rates and capacity data to understand how well you’re using your internal talent.
If you’re serious about improving internal mobility, you need to assess the success of your strategy. That means setting and monitoring KPIs like:
Here are five expert best practices to enhance internal mobility in your organization – to create a dynamic, motivated, highly skilled workforce.
McKinsey and Co research – Learning and Earning: The Bold Moves That Change Careers – found that fortune favors the brave when it comes to internal mobility:
It’s the boldness of role moves that’s a really important part of the story of possibility. It’s important to enable more workers to break out of what they might have thought was their destiny simply because of the level of education that they had. It doesn’t have to be the case.
You can defy the odds if you, as well as your employer, encourage yourself to make those bold moves. The cohorts who leave that for later or don’t make any bold moves at all have a very different path and trajectory."
Runn CEO Tim Copeland recommends businesses dismantle legacy structures and factionalism that build artificial barriers’ to internal mobility.
Businesses need to increase the fluidity of team composition and how people join and leave teams [making] the walls within the organization more permeable.
I think that's going to increase over time as enterprises seek to emulate the agility of startups. But to achieve those benefits, organizations will need increased transparency into their resources, and to what area they’re working in." - Tim Copeland, CEO of Runn.
Read more in Tim’s interview: The Future of Resource Management ➡️
We’ve already touched on the fact managers may not support internal mobility – and it is a key barrier to overcome. Deloitte found 46% of managers resist internal mobility. They explain a limited mindset, where managers are too focused on themselves and their unit KPIs.
As soon as you start optimizing for you, you’re no longer optimizing for the enterprise of other people. And it will show. [...] Should their time be spent feeding the machine, on bureaucracy, administration, presiding…? Or should it be understanding the talent they have and providing real apprenticeship, mentoring, and coaching?"
They recommend embedding a leadership mindset where managers take pride in ‘being the person who grows and unlocks talent’. Also, providing rewards and incentives for managers who enable more talent mobility and for hiring from the pool of existing employees.
To support faster, easier internal talent mobility, ‘recode the norms governing internal mobility’ says Deloitte. In particular, streamline your internal recruitment processes to ‘reinforce the belief that the organization already knows you as a candidate’.
This means ditching ‘an application process that mirrors external hiring’ and doing something more streamlined.
For example:
Our final best practice should go without saying but sadly it isn’t always the case… make mobility a meritocracy. It’s all part of crafting a people-first culture.
Promote people based on their commitment, enthusiasm, and talent. Otherwise, your mobility program could backfire, moving people based on unsound reasoning, reducing the benefits of engagement and knowledge sharing, and reducing staff morale.
Runn resource management software provides mobility-motivated businesses with
