4 Ways to Boost Internal Mobility

Every company needs an internal mobility strategy, especially when 76% of employees are actively looking for career growth opportunities at their workplace and 63% reported leaving in 2022 due to what they deemed inadequate opportunities.


A good internal mobility strategy usually starts with opportunities for employees to develop their skills and goes from there, ultimately leading to higher retention rates and greater ROI for the company.


Here’s how to promote internal mobility at your own organization in four easy steps.

1. Offer Career Pathing

According to new research by SHRM, it costs companies anywhere from 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace them and train someone new. The more cost-effective strategy, of course, is to retain that employee.

Career pathing is all about empowering your employees to envision their future career at your company, helping them set goals to get there, and illuminating next steps to make those goals a reality. Equipping employees with visibility into open opportunities within the organization that may interest them — and the skills required to secure those positions — is a great way to boost internal mobility.

When you set employees on personalized career paths and have them searching within your organization for new jobs, you’ll see internal movement and retention increase.

Customer story: How Kuehne+Nagel Empowers Employees to Own and Grow Their Careers

2. Empower Employees through Learning and Development

Employees with access to professional learning and development (L&D) opportunities have a 34% higher retention rate than those who don’t. Organizations with strong L&D programs have 30-50% higher retention rates and are 24% more profitable than their peers.

Employees are voicing their need for L&D in order to stay at their jobs. When these programs are done right, employees feel invested in their own learning and they gain the skills needed to grow within the company.

In addition to L&D programs, another great way to empower employee growth and learning is through internal gigs. Short-term gigs and projects can help upskill or reskill employees, unlocking their potential and boosting internal mobility. When you match employees to the right work, you keep talent for the long haul.

Related reading: The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity

3. Foster Connection to the Organization

A positive employee experience can’t exist without employee connection — both to the organization and to each other. One way to promote internal mobility is by offering employees the opportunity to connect through things like mentoring programs and Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).

A mentoring program helps connect talent with other employees who can help them grow and evolve within the organization. Creating personal relationships with one another fosters a sense of community, belonging, and care — leading to both employee development and retention.

Through ERGs, employees can find close-knit communities within your organization with which they can identify — and thrive. Not only can ERGs encourage interaction and dialogue through group events and a real-time forum, but they can also share specific open roles that employees of that ERG may be particularly interested in to promote visibility and opportunity.

Employees who can’t grow are likely to go, and building employee growth through connection is just another internal mobility strategy you can implement tomorrow.

Related reading: Mentoring: Why It’s Important and How it Improves the Employee Experience

4. Adopt a Talent Marketplace That Uses AI to Personalize and Automate the Experience

One of the easiest ways to boost internal mobility is to adopt a talent marketplace. In fact, in a report from Garter®, they predict that “by 2025, 20% of large enterprises will have deployed an internal talent marketplace to optimize the utilization and agility of talent.”

A talent marketplace takes the above three practices and houses them all in one place. Through the power of AI technology, employees can search for jobs, map out career paths, connect with mentors, join ERGs, and develop their skills through gigs.

An AI-powered talent marketplace communicates and campaigns all opportunities to employees, and with these tools and programs in place, talent management teams and managers can regularly (and easily!) reinforce areas of growth and development within the company.

In short, a talent marketplace boosts internal mobility by engaging and empowering employees to apply for open internal roles and discover opportunities for learning, development, and connectivity within your organization — ultimately retaining them for the future.

Related reading: Talent Marketplace: The Next Evolution of Career Intelligence and Internal Mobility

Building a successful internal mobility strategy that engages and retains employees doesn’t have to be hard.

If you’re ready to dive deeper into internal mobility examples that can help your team, check out our blog on how a Talent Marketplace can improve retention.