Why Internal Mobility is Important for Career Advancement Opportunities
Publié le 11 April 2024
When you’re ready for a promotion at work, it’s important to know why internal mobility is important for career advancement opportunities.
Companies that value their employees need to pay particular attention to the career progression opportunities they offer, because those are often integral to keeping employees happy and fulfilled.
But what about internal mobility?
We’ll discuss exactly why you need to offer internal opportunities for employees, as well as what internal mobility looks like. After that, we’ll share some great tips for getting these career advancement opportunities just right, so stick around to learn more.
What is internal mobility?
First, of course, we need to cover what internal mobility actually entails.
It’s all about the movement of talent within your company—though not necessarily always in a linear sense. If you’re only concerned with offering opportunities for dedicated employees to be promoted, that’s still great, but it’s not quite on the same level.
Instead, internal mobility concerns itself with empowering employees to make internal moves of all kinds. That includes moves between departments or moves to tangentially relevant roles.
For example, internal mobility might involve providing opportunities for a contact center employee to take on a role in the finance department. This could be particularly beneficial for a W-2 employee looking to explore new career paths within the organization.
What makes internal mobility so important?
As per a recent research article, internal mobility has an important impact on both individuals and the company at large; but why?
The following advantages include allowing your employees to make internal moves that support their career goals and preferences.
Investing in employees’ careers
Your employees want to know that you care about their career development beyond simply encouraging them to move up a linear career ladder. You can do this by offering internal career mobility.
That’s because their career aspirations will rarely follow a very straightforward career path.
Let’s go back to our contact center agent example from before. Our agent might be an expert in handling inbound calls, but if they have no interest in becoming a contact center manager, they’ll easily feel that you aren’t offering them any meaningful career opportunities.
Unless, of course, you listen when they say that they want to put their call experience to work in the sales department.
In this way, you can support their career growth by allowing for plenty of career agility and mobility.
Promoting increased engagement
It can be difficult to motivate disengaged employees to unlock their own potential, especially if your own engagement efforts don’t seem to be reaching them.
Thankfully, internal mobility is fantastic for employee engagement.
That’s because offering a greater degree of talent mobility helps you prove to your employees that you’re ready to listen to their needs and wants.
This reminds them that doing their best and working hard will help them get to where they want to be, even if they’re not in the right department or team for that dream role just yet.
As an added bonus, this also lets you alleviate remote worker burnout by showing burned-out workers that there are plenty of fresh new opportunities waiting for them within your company.
Boosting talent retention
As per a 2023 study, talent retention has a major impact on talent management, which in turn has a notable effect on employee performance. In other words, if your company is able to increase employee retention, your talent managers will also have an easier time. This will then drive employee’s work performance up.
And internal mobility is great for talent retention.
That’s because your talent acquisition team can always start by browsing the internal talent marketplace before looking outside. Your company gets to practice talent hoarding—which is a good thing, despite how the name sounds—and your recruitment specialists don’t have to spend ages combing through an external talent marketplace. It’s a win-win!
Meeting business goals
Businesses need motivated and engaged employees if they want to meet their goals and continue to thrive. As we’ve established, internal mobility motivates employees.
It’s also helpful for business leaders to recruit internal talent who already knows the company’s inner workings. This lets those leaders save time and focus on business priorities instead of worrying about long onboarding processes.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to offer new internal business opportunities to employees who are familiar with coding because AI assistants are going to figure into your latest business strategy. Since those internal employees already know what your company’s internal demands look like, they’ll be able to jump right in and help work towards your common business goal.
Upskilling your workforce
There’s a good reason why improving and expanding employee skills has been a major focus for companies since 2020; improving employees’ skill sets helps them become more multifaceted and adaptable in their work.
Image sourced from learning.linkedin.com
And with internal mobility, it’s easier than ever to help employees build relevant skills. Providing training sessions, workshops, and online courses tailored to various job roles within the company is essential. Moreover, utilizing creative tools to facilitate learning, such as interactive modules or you can create infographics summarizing key concepts, can enhance comprehension and retention.
When your employees can try out new positions and move within your company, they can quickly sharpen essential skills while also developing new ones, all without having to start from the ground up in their job search.
That means your workforce is less likely to have a skills gap, making it easier for you to ensure every position is filled optimally.
Best practices for improving internal mobility
Now that we’ve explored why internal mobility is important for career advancement opportunities, we’ll share some top tips to help you make your internal moves as seamless as possible. This list of best practices is in no particular order.
Use a single, centralized software solution
One great way to make lateral moves within your organization much easier on everyone is to ensure that your company tech supports those moves.
You can do this using centralized tools.
These let you handle workflows like communication with candidates, logging work hours, generating graphs from data, and much more, all in one place. That way, your contact center employees can use the same skillset that lets them interact with their virtual agent software to perform other roles as well.
Offer secondment opportunities
One great way to start creating more internal positions without adding new positions is to offer secondments or project-based roles. These let employees move to a different role temporarily, while still being able to return to their current position once the secondment period ends.
That way, you can create a vacant position without affecting your overall number of existing positions.
Secondments are great ways to offer more senior positions to employees on a temporary business. In this way, someone in an associate position can try their hand at managing increased responsibilities and build leadership experience without the pressure of knowing their role is fully permanent.
Bring up mobility during recruitment
When you’re in the process of working on external recruitment, make it clear to candidates that you’re invested in internal recruitment as well.
This shows them that you’re committed to their growth before they’ve even started, while also helping you cut down on recruitment costs by boosting ROI from each recruitment process.
To help your recruitment team explain the internal recruitment process and communicate with candidates seamlessly, use an ATS recruitment software, or a similar integration. This lets you stay on top of recruitment developments and connect more meaningfully with your candidates.
Offer training and upskilling classes
It’s no secret that, as researcher Ling Li said in a 2022 article, ‘over two-thirds of skills considered important in today’s job requirements will change’ in the immediate future. That’s why upskilling and cross-training for more varied skill sets is so important, and why you should make it part of your internal mobility approach.
Your internal marketplace is full of hopeful talent that wants to be better at the jobs that matter to them. By offering plenty of internal training, you can take advantage of this enthusiasm and help your employees gain the skills they need to thrive.
Plus, that way you can ensure that anyone taking up important roles in your company has been properly trained and will perform the roles exactly as you want them to.
Remember: it’s an opportunity for you too
Being able to reskill workers so they perfectly fit your requirements is a massive opportunity, and not just for your internal candidates. Rather, every internal opportunity is a positive thing for your company.
It’s a good idea to treat each internal job opportunity accordingly.
By thinking of every internal mobility opportunity you offer as a chance for you to train and improve your workforce, you’ll be able to create opportunities that are meaningful to the company and its workers alike.
Final thoughts
Offering internal development opportunities for your employees is about more than giving out promotions. While those are important, you’ve also got to support lateral movement and secondments, as well as inter-department collaboration that fosters job opportunities.
That way, you can create true internal mobility.
And that’s why internal mobility is important for career advancement opportunities to both your employees and your company as a whole, because it supports both parties’ interests. That’s why you need internal movement, and why it’s useful for offering your employees the chance to grow their careers.
