Internal Mobility
In our last post, we shared the growth of the Learning and Development (L&D) function within HR as researched by LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report. In this post, we’ll continue to look at insights from the report looking at internal mobility.
According to the report, “More than half (51%) of L&D pros globally report internal mobility is even more of a priority since the pandemic struck, and that trend has shown up in LinkedIn data. We’re seeing a sizable rise in internal mobility; from April through August 2020 the internal hiring rate was nearly 20% higher than it was during the same time in 2019.”
L&D leadership must prioritize internal mobility both for the value derived from it and because there is not a single role that can oversee the processing company-wide. Internal mobility requires a distributed, cross-functional approach. Identifying transferable skill sets requires familiarity with both the employees and the new and or open roles that need to be filled.
If your first thought is to identify “skill adjacencies”, you’re not alone. So you might be surprised to hear that this approach is not necessarily the best one. Many of the successful hires for new, emerging roles come from totally unrelated occupations.
“The most inspiring take away from these insights is that people are much more capable of learning new skills and moving into higher-priority positions than traditionally thought. This will be critical given the acceleration of technological change and the increasingly pressing need to retrain and redeploy talent for the new world of work, as the World Economic Forum prediction tells us.”
The return on investment (ROI) associated with internal mobility is not surprising. Employees working at companies that have high internal mobility stay with the company twice as long as employees at companies that have low internal mobility. When you consider the cost of hiring for an open position, including lost productivity, this is an enormous benefit.
And it doesn’t stop there, these employees are also more engaged in their work at a rate of three and a half times. This approach makes good business sense and turns existing employees into renewable resources. And as new jobs are created and new skill sets are required, the ability to re-train quickly can be a competitive advantage.
Creating internal mobility has shown to be effective, but what does it encompass? The primary element of an internal mobility initiative is digital fluency. The majority of new jobs being created require a level of technical acumen. According to the survey, the top two skills needed were consistent across global regions. Digital fluency and resiliency.
If you think about it, the two go hand in hand. Often, digital fluency is a skill that must be nurtured in employees, especially Boomers and Gen X who aren’t digital natives like Millennials, and Gen Z. Thus, being resilient is necessary for people to learn and master new, often foreign, skill sets.
Another interesting finding from the survey for re-training is to focus on the community aspect. According to the survey,” we found that learners who use social features on average watched 30 times more hours of learning content. Hello, higher learner engagement!” One-to-one learning may work for some, but the aspect of ‘‘we’re in this together”, improves learning, increases engagement, and provides a sense of belonging.
In our next post, we’ll wrap up our analysis of the LinkedIn report. If you have questions about creating a culture of internal mobility, send us a note.