Internal Mobility Best Practices to Engage and Retain Employees

Employees

The LinkedIn Learning course Navigating Internal Mobility as an Employee from author and speaker Mary Abbajay is a great resource for helping employees understand how internal mobility can benefit them. “Internal mobility can be a great career accelerant,” Abbajay says. The course provides employees with a robust curriculum to help them understand and plan out their own internal mobility strategy.

Managers

A particularly skilled employee may be the perfect candidate for another position within the organization — but their manager may have other ideas. In cases of managers who are reluctant to support internal mobility for their teams, L&D professionals can share research from LinkedIn showing that lack of manager support for career growth is more likely to cause an employee to look externally for their next role.

Internal mobility can also be a net positive for managers themselves. Instead of seeing an internal move as a loss, L&D professionals should frame it as an opportunity to gain an ally elsewhere in the organization.

Lateral moves

When an employee wants to explore a different department, they can often do their same role or a similar role elsewhere in the organization. A lateral move like this gives the employee exposure to a different function of the business and, in conjunction with an online reskilling or upskilling program, potentially an opening to a new career path.

Downward moves

Sometimes coursework is not enough. When an employee is interested in fundamentally shifting their career path and taking on entirely new responsibilities in the near term, the best option may be to take a step back on the seniority path to get relevant on-the-job experience. A downward move will also give the employee a unique perspective on how their new department operates, which may be invaluable to the team and the company as a whole.

Map training to career goals

The best way to ensure an employee stays engaged with their learning plan is to make the coursework relevant to their specific career goals. When planning a custom learning path, L&D professionals should listen to what excites the employee, what their professional ambitions are, and what new skills will get them to where they want to go.

Guide employees based on organizational skill gaps

Employee training does neither the company nor the employee any good if the skills being taught do not translate directly into filling current or upcoming skill gaps. When working with employees to develop custom learning paths, L&D professionals have an opportunity to guide which skills the employee emphasizes in line with their interests and business needs. This alignment will make any future internal mobility much smoother and more effective.

Develop an internal leadership development program

Training hard skills is a relatively straightforward process. However, soft skills such as communication and leadership are harder to train. In fact, these skills often require their own dedicated program. And since 85% of executives are looking at a dwindling leadership pipeline, L&D should look to develop their own program to train internal talent to fill those upcoming vacancies.

Make learning social

Colleagues create and participate in work culture together, so fostering a culture of learning starts with community-based learning. When employees learn alongside their colleagues using an online learning platform’s social tools, they help each other and stay motivated to learn more. In fact, social learning tends to result in better outcomes than solitary learning.

Messages from executives

As company-wide leaders, executives have a central role to play in creating a culture of learning. A quick video message from one or more members of the C-suite about the importance of continued learning, their own learning goals, and internal mobility will help reinforce L&D’s messaging.

Make learning fun

Career satisfaction and mobility can be powerful motivators to keep employees learning. But those long-term goals could use some help from something a little more immediate: gamification. By building fun challenges and rewards into learning programs, L&D professionals can create smaller incremental incentives to keep employees learning.

“Organizations have an opportunity to give employees what they want, and in the process become more agile and competitive. Leaders looking for a way forward can start by asking: Does our culture support employee growth and internal mobility? Do we model the behavior and celebrate the right outcomes? Do we know how we’re doing in helping employees find fulfilling work?”

Track business-critical skills

To understand whether an internal mobility program is effective — and where it may need to be fine-tuned — it is important to create a company-wide skills database. Track which skills the business needs and which have been added to the current workforce through internal upskilling and reskilling. With this data, L&D professionals can prove effectiveness or redirect efforts as needed.

Employee surveys

The fastest way to an answer is simply to ask. By sending out regular employee surveys, L&D professionals can see what the learners themselves say is or is not working. Keeping an eye on learner sentiment will help ensure engagement rates stay high and may hold important clues about how to proceed if engagement lags.