Offering Career Mobility Can Be a Business Strategy—If You Get It Right  

Promotions are doled out annually with a 1% pay rise (or whatever arbitrary number companies choose) and are offered based on seniority. You work 30 years to climb the corporate ladder bit by bit for the dream of a cushy retirement (where you can finally rest after grinding most of your life). 

But employees aren’t waiting decades for promotions anymore, and they’re certainly not lured in solely by the management track.  

The top-performing HR leaders create internal mobility programs that give them visibility of what they need and show employees where they can do. Those HR leaders also know career mobility’s not just the key to any old employee value proposition (EVP). It’s key to EVP that drives business strategy (rhyme not intended). 

The career mobility crisis 

Career mobility is all but lip service in a lot of organizations. People feel limited by shitty performance reviews, let alone able to access development opportunities that take them somewhere. 

Not feeling like they can grow in their current roles translates to a problem of poor employee retention and engagement for organizations down the line. The changing cost of living means people won’t wait an entire year to get that 1% pay rise. They need job security. And they will leave to get these things from someone else if you don’t offer it to them. 

On the flip side is how you address underperformance. Traditionally, it leads to the dreaded performance improvement plan (PIP). PIPs can be seen as the first step to being let go. No one wants to be on them, nor do people necessarily believe they will help them improve. We’d wager this has something to do with the reactivity of PIPs, which can give the impression that people’s personal development is an afterthought. 

Even worse, poor retention means you’re not just losing your people but the capabilities that keep you competitive. LinkedIn Learning’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found the top 10 skills lost to attrition are the most valuable and hardest to replace.  

If it’s not obvious, you lose what makes your organization strategic when you don’t create pathways for internal mobility. Think of it like going to the shops to buy your favorite sweet treat, but your money’s been falling out of your pocket all the way there. You don’t have enough money to get that sweet treat, and someone else is sure going to enjoy the value of your lost coins. 

Weird metaphors aside, 74% of employers are struggling to find talent globally. It’s not a lack of people for the roles available, but a shortage of the right capabilities that match those jobs (hence why you shouldn’t rely on job titles when designing your workforce).  

So, if you can’t find talent, retaining and optimizing the employee skills, knowledge, and behaviors you already have is the strategy for people leaders. 

Oh, and you know what else is funny here? LinkedIn also found that engagement and retention are the top two metrics used to measure the business impact of career development. It’s a vicious cycle: no career mobility, no motivation for employees, and no flow of strategic knowledge in your workforce. No motivation for employees, no reason to try hard or stay. No reason to stay… well, this sentence writes itself. 

Making career mobility a business strategy 

We’ve said it before, but performance and career development are inherently personal. Upward mobility—and the remuneration and responsibility or perceived authority that comes with it—is intrinsically tied to someone’s performance. Even lateral mobility into specialized, often individual contributor roles speaks to a person’s “siloed” expertise.  

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. People want to do well at work. Not all, but most of your employees want to have an impact. Playing on that desire means fundamentally changing how your organization looks at, assesses, and rewards performance. 

It’s a four-parter. 

1. Rethink “ideal” performance 
2. Make opportunities visible 
3. Give managers what they need to nurture talent 
4. Build clear development pathways.  

1. Flip the performance script 

Let’s start with how you frame performance. Are you rating employees out of five? What criteria are they measured against? Do your people even know how they’re being assessed? 

We think about it like talking the same language. If leaders and their people are talking about performance with the same understanding of what “good” looks like, they’re going to have more productive conversations about gaps and growth opportunities. 

That language for us is capabilities, because capability-led organizations are winning organizations. McKinsey found that investing in capability development can lead to 7x higher productivity.  

When you flip from, say, a rating-based performance management approach to a capability-led one, you root employee performance in business strategy. That inherently shows employees their impact on business, which also gives HR and people leaders the right data to make effective decisions about internal mobility. 

We recently had a Designer & Developer role evolve to include an AI skillset under the capability of Frontend Development. Rather than deciding the employee didn’t have the necessary skills, we enabled them to learn those skills on the job with new projects (and you can see the impact of said Acornian’s capabilities right here). Not only do we benefit from the added capabilities as an organization, but our Acornian now has evidence of an in-demand skillset for their resume and to show at their next performance review. Win-win. 

2. Make organizational gaps or opportunities visible 

The biggest challenge HR and talent leaders face is literally understanding a) the gaps in their workforce and b) the capabilities they have to leverage to fill those gaps. Our own Director of Operations & People started at Acorn facing this exact dilemma. 

What cleared the hurdle for her was aligning every role in the organization with our business strategy. This was done in our Capabilities module, wherein she could map five core capabilities to every role (or multiple roles within a cohort, like for our team of customer support officers). Each capability has five proficiency levels that are used to evaluate how said capability is performed. 

Once capabilities were assigned, we rolled into a regular flow of capability assessments every six weeks. Over time, the results of those assessments start to paint a picture across the organization. For the individual, it means they can set goals of where they want to go with their manager and, if you tie that to a learning plan, what they need to do to get there. 

From your org’s perspective, and using Acorn’s capability gap analysis report, you can see: 

• Gaps by way of people assessed below the assigned level of proficiency for any given capability 
• Opportunities for those performing at or above the assigned level. 

Through this report, you can look closely at individual teams to understand what they’re missing or zoom as far out as the entire workforce. 

That makes it clear: 

• Who is stagnating at a certain job or proficiency level 
• Where high-potential employees might be stuck 
• The capabilities you can redeploy internally vs. those you may need to hire for. 

3. Enable managers to nurture talent in their teams 

No one really wants to let go of their A-players. There could be a million reasons team managers are hoarding them: There’s only one A-player propping up the team. Maybe the A-player is doing all the team’s work. The manager might simply not know how to enable talent mobility. Maybe they’re a new team lead and have no idea who the A-players are.  

To stop managers from inadvertently or purposefully gatekeeping talent, you have to train them to move it through your organization. And to do that, you have to make them feel sure there is a supply of talent to plug the gaps moving people on creates. 

First step: make opportunities visible (checked off, above). 

Second: introduce frequent performance conversations that stack up to career growth. We talk about this a lot—because we’ve found the more frequent the conversations, the easier it is for managers to identify performance gaps and employees to raise goals. What works for us is a weekly or fortnightly cadence for one-on-ones (or Performance Pulses, as we call them) where leaders and their teams discuss how they’re tracking against their capabilities. 

These are perfect opportunities for managers to give productive criticism, but also positive feedback. According to Great Place to Work, people who feel consistently recognized at work are: 

• 2.6x more likely to think promotions are fair 
• 2.2x more likely to drive innovation 
• More likely to experience higher job satisfaction with a culture of career success. 

Third: make internal mobility a success, not a loss. Managers need to be recognized and rewarded for developing high-potential employees.  

If you have the budget, extra time off, bonuses or raises, and profit sharing are all ways to reward team managers. Don’t forget about the power of public recognition, either. Encourage leaders to shout one another out, or even post a top performer on your company’s social media profiles, if you’re so inclined. 

4. Make career progression tangible 

When we say tangible, we mean both accessible and personal.  

Take the Acornian who developed their AI skills. Let’s say they wanted to specialize in AI development. They have the interest, which often translates to drive, and they have a baseline of development capabilities. They even have some experience in AI. We can take them further, based on the gap between the capabilities they hold and those required to meet their goals.  

Our Capabilities platform, for example, will build development plans based on the results of capability assessments. Say the Acornian is required to perform at the proficient level for the capability of secure coding practices, but their manager assesses them a level below. If Capabilities is integrated with an LMS, you can map capabilities to learning content so learners can find the exact training needed to close their gaps. (Note: you’re then boosting learning adoption in the process of closing gaps.) 

You can do more accurate salary banding by way of proficiency, meaning you’ll have: 

• More objective data for salary increases  
• Less subjectivity with pay rises, especially if you also consider “in-demand” capabilities 
• Transparency on pay bands, creating a personal motivator for employees to seek development. 

You can also think bigger than just the role. Interagency mobility is usually baked into recruitment for government (with merit pools, for example), and makes it easier for hiring managers to speak to references and ensure employees are already familiar with government operations, values, and culture. For enterprise groups with multiple subsidiaries, moving people between brands or divisions means they rely less on external hires and boost time to productivity. 

Think beyond borders, too. Enabling internal mobility across global teams gives people exposure to different team dynamics and builds resilience and adaptability—key capabilities for business agility that leaders need to develop, according to McKinsey. 

Key takeaways 

As we mentioned, traditional career paths focus on an eternal upward climb, wherein employees collect titles like Pokémon. (Think Junior, Associate, Senior, Director, etc.) People don’t value the same linear climb as they used to, and many more simply don’t want to move into a managerial position, the only historical move to make more money. 

What makes internal mobility important is not simply opportunities for employees. You create a unique talent pool of internal candidates with career mobility, boost job satisfaction, and make your organization a desirable employer.  

You may not build a strong internal mobility program overnight, but you can set the wheels in motion to give your employees opportunities to grow in your organization. If you like the idea of a common language and platform for performance conversations, get in touch for a chat about Capabilities.