Internal Mobility Is a Top Priority for 2022: Here’s How L&D Can Play a Role

Faced with a tight labor market and “The Great Reshuffle,” organizations are looking at new ways to engage and retain employees. One such initiative is internal mobility, where employees are given the opportunity and training to pursue a new role, and even a new career path, within the organization.

“In 2022, we expect more companies to embrace the motto: switch careers, not companies,” writes Teuila Hanson, LinkedIn’s Chief People Officer, in Fast Company. As people are leaving jobs in record numbers, Hanson explains that “companies must look at new ways to provide employees with professional development opportunities so they consider staying longer within an organization. This includes fostering internal career transitions and skill-building to help retain employees who may be itching for a fresh start.”

LinkedIn data shows that employees who move into new jobs internally are 3.5x more likely to be engaged than those who stay in their current jobs; and when organizations invest in internal mobility programs, employees stay almost two times longer. With this kind of payoff, it makes sense that 62% of L&D pros are prioritizing internal mobility.

As L&D gets more involved in this effort, here are four ways you can evolve your learning strategy to support your organization’s internal mobility goals.

1. Partner across the organization to identify business goals and skills gaps

A successful internal mobility program aligns the entire organization on what skills are needed now and in the future. And as an L&D leader, it’s important you’re part of this conversation.

Work with senior leadership to understand the strategic roadmap and determine what skills are needed to meet certain milestones, such as engaging in new markets or launching new products. It’s also important to partner with leaders across HR, like Talent Acquisition, to gain insight into the workforce-planning strategy and make sure the skills you’re building map to the roles that will open in the future.

As Senior People Science Consultant Avneeta Solanki explains, internal collaboration is required for a skills-based internal mobility strategy to succeed: “We need to understand what the organization’s strategy is for the future; what skills we need to get there; which of these skills we can develop in house versus recruit for externally; and who are the employees that possess these skills already or whom we could upskill in a relatively short period of time.”

2. Create skill-building opportunities that map to career goals

Along with understanding big-picture organizational goals, you also need to get clear on employees’ career aspirations and help them connect those personal goals to the business goals.

“Spend as much time understanding the needs of your learners as you do understanding the needs of the business and you’re going to have a breakthrough program where everyone is engaged,” advises Alyson DeMaso, CEO of Raising Beauty. When people see how learning new skills can help them (and the business) grow, they’ll be more engaged.

One way to bring this to life is to build learning paths and encourage managers and department heads to distribute them to teams and individuals who want or need to learn new skills – to switch to another functional area, for example. Data shows that companies that recommend courses on LinkedIn Learning see 69% more hours watched per learner.

Uber’s internal mobility strategy, which encourages lateral and often unconventional moves, is focused on helping employees find roles they love. In the last three years, for example, Uber has graduated 50 new product managers through its internal mobility program called PM Academy.

“We know that definitely the marketplace is never going to meet our needs,” says Jonathan Reyes, Uber’s director of global talent acquisition operations. “So, we get people with no product-management skill set, and they go into our product team and learn how to become a product manager. To us, that is a significant advantage in the talent marketplace, but it also gives us a story of how you can grow your skills and become something else with adjacent skills.”

It’s an effective strategy. After employees move into a new role at Uber, they stay with the company twice as long compared to peers who don’t move.

3. Make sure managers understand the value of internal mobility

Our recent Employee Well-Being Report revealed that 91% of employees say it’s important for managers to inspire learning and experimentation. Yet, that is not what happens in practice. The report showed that only 40% of learners say that their managers are challenging them to learn a new skill, and just over half (53%) say that their managers support their career goals.

Especially with internal-mobility efforts, manager support is critical, and L&D is in a good position to encourage managers to be more active in skill-building and internal-mobility efforts. As Eric Knudsen, a LinkedIn People Science senior researcher, shares: “Whenever someone starts looking for their next opportunity, a lack of manager support could force an external move. It’s important to frame internal mobility to managers as a moment of growth rather than a moment of loss."

Communicate that managers have a lot to gain from internal mobility, from access to proven talent to improved partnerships across the business. "An internal move means their team will have a new advocate and partner in a different part of the organization – something that could improve cross-team collaboration, which is a key element of organizational success,” says Knudsen.

Managers also need to know that great people are not lost forever. LinkedIn data shows that "boomerang" hiring accounted for 4.5% of new hires in 2021.

Richard Liddington, director of international internal recruitment at Salesforce, thinks the best managers earn reputations for developing top talent and exposing people to bigger, better roles, and often that comes in the form of internal mobility. He says: “Be the manager who attracts, builds, develops, and exports talent because employees will leave. They won’t work with you forever, and we want them to go to another area of Salesforce.”

4. Track your impact — it matters to the business

Organizations are still trying to get internal mobility right. It can be a complex process that includes many different players, from People Analytics to Talent Acquisition. As L&D continues to play a role in readying the workforce for internal opportunities, it will be important to measure and track progress.

One good indicator of L&D’s impact on the business, explains Ann Ann Low, a senior director of L&D at LinkedIn, is building employee capabilities for the future. “This can be quantified by the number of business-critical roles that can be filled by internal talent because of their learning and development journey, or how L&D is accelerating the leadership-succession pipeline for the business,” she says.

Work with People Analytics partners to understand how learning and skill-building relate to internal mobility, and in turn to engagement and retention. And, as with any learning initiative, go to the employees directly. The LEGO Group, for instance, surveys employees about whether they have good opportunities to learn and develop and whether they actively seek out development opportunities. Johannes Lystbaek, a learning & development manager at the LEGO Group, says, “Those are our most important KPIs, and we’re looking forward to tracking progress against them.”

A true learning culture must include internal mobility

Today, whenever we talk about creating a culture of learning, we also need to talk about internal mobility, where people are encouraged to lookout for new opportunities internally. As Salesforce’s Richard Liddington says, “It is about progressing your career and developing yourself further. If I’m better, the team is better. If the team is better, the business is better, and the company is better.”

That’s value that everyone – from employees to managers to leadership — can get behind.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn. You can view it here.