Clearing the Career Path: Why Internal Mobility Is Your Greatest Asset

Employees dissatisfied with their career development were almost two times more apt to say they were extremely unlikely to stay with their current company, according to WorldatWork’s 2026 State of Rewards Report.

Additional research from Work Institute’s Retention Report found that career-related issues remained the leading reason employees left a job, cited by 18% of departing workers. 

All of this presents an opportunity for HR leaders to address employee retention and skills gaps by prioritizing and developing their internal talent.

“When employees can see real openings, understand what it takes to qualify and watch coworkers make successful moves, career growth stops sounding like a nice promise from HR. It starts to feel real,” said Spencer Fleming, the product marketing manager at HR technology company Phenom. “There’s a path, there are people taking it and there’s a reason to believe they could be next.”

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• How AI Is Transforming Internal Mobility to Help Employers, Employees

A People and Business Issue

According to Fleming, people rarely leave a company just because they want a different job title. More often, it’s because they can’t picture what’s next for them where they are.

“They leave because they’ve hit a wall,” he said. “They want a bigger challenge, new skills or a chance to try something different, and the only obvious way forward seems to be updating their resume. If the company can show them another route, it has a much better shot at keeping them.”

Fleming called internal mobility “a people strategy and a business strategy.”

“For employees, it creates a clearer sense of career momentum,” he explained. “People are more likely to stay engaged when they can see opportunities to build new skills, take on bigger challenges and move into roles that better match their strengths without having to leave the company to do it.”

Meanwhile, for the business, Fleming said internal mobility helps organizations get more value from talent they already know. External hiring always will be important, but it can be expensive and uncertain, he said. In fact, a 2025 Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum found that internal reskilling cost approximately 30% less than external hiring. 

Guna Jayaraman, the chief artificial intelligence (AI) officer at workforce agility and talent management platform Cornerstone, cited its research that showed high-performing organizations that deliberately deployed internal talent toward cross-functional business challenges were six times more likely to do it well.

“It is a genuine win-win: The business staffs critical work sooner, and people grow instead of stalling,” he said.

What’s Holding Talent Back

Even if your top performers want to move up the career ladder, there may be barriers preventing them from doing so.

“Traditional HR systems were designed primarily around jobs and organizational structures, and these systems often struggle to identify transferable skills across functions,” said Sue Holloway, a content director at WorldatWork. “One of the biggest challenges isn’t a lack of talent.  It’s a lack of visibility in the talent organizations already have or that can be developed and redeployed.”

Angela Berg, a vice president and the talent, culture and change consulting leader at advisory firm Alliant Human Capital, agreed, adding, “Most organizations don’t spend a lot of time or resources on educating employees about career tracks and the skills and competencies that are needed to grow a career. Nor, have many successfully linked internal mobility to the programs that support it, such as learning and development. Employees are largely left to themselves to figure it out.”

Jayaraman noted that the deeper issue is mobility happens at the level of work, not job titles.

“Work is really a set of tasks, and tasks are where skills actually show up, so a title tells you far less than the work underneath it,” he said. “The result is a gap between what employers think they can see and what employees experience.”

The Cornerstone research found 40% of employers said they had robust visibility into skills, yet only 28% of them said their skills were actually visible and used.

“When leaders cannot see the capability they have, managers default to protecting their teams instead of moving talent to where it helps the organization most,” Jayaraman said.

Every organization has people whose capabilities stretch far beyond what’s written in their job title, Fleming added.

“Someone in finance may be a terrific project leader. A customer-facing employee may have deep product expertise. A marketer may be the person who quietly keeps cross-functional work moving. But if the company is still relying on old job descriptions, annual reviews and who a manager happens to know, those skills stay hidden in plain sight,” he said. “Then, the organization goes out and pays to hire for capabilities that were already sitting a few desks away.”

The result, Fleming said, is a frustrating process for employees who may have no idea what roles are open, what those roles actually require or how to make a credible move into a new part of the business.

“The answer is to make opportunity easier to see and easier to act on,” Fleming said. “Employees need a clear view of potential career paths. Managers need to be recognized for developing people, even when that growth takes talent to another team. ... Organizations that get mobility right treat talent as a shared advantage, not a resource to keep locked inside one department.”

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics:

• Career Growth
• Employee Experience
• Employee Recognition
• Total Rewards