- “Our ambitious employees leave for growth opportunities they could have found internally—if only they knew where to look.”
- “Our organization has roles that remain unfilled for months while ideal internal candidates remain invisible to hiring managers.”
- “Our teams are falling behind on critical initiatives because you can’t rapidly deploy existing talent to meet evolving business needs.”
If your organization is grappling with any of the above challenges, you’re facing an internal mobility crisis, and our data shows you’re far from alone.
In a recent survey of over 300 HR leaders, a striking 42% reported significant struggles with internal mobility despite acknowledging its critical importance to their talent strategy.
While the broader skills crisis has many contributing factors, our research has identified three primary root causes that specifically undermine internal mobility efforts. These systemic barriers persist even in organizations with substantial HR investments and well-intentioned leadership.
In this article, we’ll examine these core issues and, more importantly, reveal how forward-thinking organizations are successfully overcoming them. Drawing from real-world examples of companies that have transformed their approach to internal mobility, we’ll provide actionable insights to help your organization turn this challenge into a competitive advantage.
Why your internal mobility efforts keep hitting invisible walls
Contrary to popular belief, the root causes of poor internal mobility aren’t budget constraints or a lack of executive buy-in.
Instead, our research reveals the most significant barriers are managerial practices that inadvertently block talent flow, outdated HR technologies that reinforce organizational silos, and fundamental gaps in skills visibility.
These everyday factors create the perfect storm that prevents talent from moving where it’s needed most.
Here’s how.
Your management unintentionally creates barriers to mobility
The first culprit in the internal mobility crisis is unconscious managerial behaviors that stagnate talent.
Our data shows many of the organizations that struggle with internal mobility point to managerial resistance as a significant obstacle (though they rarely frame it as deliberate).
This opposition manifests in several ways: Managers, often incentivized by short-term team performance metrics, naturally protect their high performers from opportunities elsewhere within the organization. When a promising team member expresses interest in another role, many managers view it as a threat rather than a win for the overall company.
This problem then compounds at scale.
At KeyBank, before their mobility transformation, they discovered what many organizations experience: Departmental silos had created talent islands where skills and potential remained locked in place.
Their SVP & Chief Learning Officer, Carole Torres, noted that their managers were “no longer competing with [just] other banks for talent, but with other departments.”
The irony is that most managers don’t consciously block mobility; they simply lack the tools, incentives, and cultural support to facilitate it.
At UCI, where they’ve since cut attrition by 50%, leadership recognized this disconnect early. As their Vice Chancellor for IT and Data, Tom Andriola, put it, “The goal is to hold on to our talent and to invest in our talent… That’s where the strategy and platform enablement idea came from.”
The challenging truth is that, without addressing these managerial obstacles first, even the most sophisticated mobility programs will falter.
Technical solutions alone cannot overcome human resistance, particularly when it’s unintentional and embedded in how performance is measured and rewarded.
Your current HR technology reinforces rather than removes silos
The second root cause of the internal mobility crisis lies in technology—specifically, HR systems that were designed to maintain organizational structures rather than transcend them.
Most organizations invest heavily in HR technology, yet these solutions often entrench the very problem they should solve.
Look closely at your current HR stack; you likely have systems that efficiently store employee data, manage performance reviews, and track recruitment metrics. You may even have impressive dashboards that visualize workforce trends.
But this technological infrastructure typically suffers from being built around organizational charts and job titles rather than skills and capabilities. This structural limitation creates a paradox: The more sophisticated your HR systems become at managing existing organizational structures, the more they reinforce the departmental boundaries that block internal mobility.
Each business unit maintains its own talent data, uses different terminology to describe similar skills, and lacks visibility into capabilities outside its immediate sphere.
At CarTrawler, Marie Power, director of talent, discovered this flaw when employees consistently reported feeling stuck despite the company’s substantial investments in HR technology.
“Employees were craving career growth and development, but they lacked visibility into where those opportunities were and how they could access them,” she noted. The data existed, but it wasn’t connected in ways that facilitated movement.
The technology problem compounds the management issue. Even managers who genuinely want to support internal mobility lack the tools to identify suitable internal candidates outside their immediate network. Meanwhile, employees are unable to discover opportunities that match their skills and aspirations across departmental boundaries.
The result is a fragmented view of talent that preserves silos rather than breaking them down.
Your skills visibility is limited (you can’t see, you can’t develop)
The third fundamental barrier—and perhaps the most insidious—is limited visibility into skills across your organization. That entails more than simply maintaining a complete skills inventory; it’s about connecting skills to opportunities in meaningful, actionable ways.
You can’t develop, deploy, or leverage what you cannot see. Yet, most organizations have a fragmented understanding of their employees’ skills at best.
Job descriptions capture only a fraction of capabilities. Performance reviews focus on outcomes rather than competencies. Employees themselves often struggle to articulate their full skill sets, particularly those capabilities developed through experience rather than formal training.
This skills blindness produces a vicious cycle wherein, without clear visibility into existing capabilities, organizations can’t effectively identify gaps, target development, or match talent to relevant opportunities. They then resort to external hiring for skills that may already exist internally, while employees with untapped potential remain invisible.
Senior Vice President People at Relayr Cindy Rubbens articulated this challenge precisely: “There’s always an opportunity, but if our people don’t know, if we haven’t told them, or if we haven’t made that [career path transparency] clear, then they don’t know and they go elsewhere.“
The visibility problem extends beyond simple awareness. Even when organizations attempt to catalog skills, they often lack the architecture to make those skills actionable. Skills taxonomies become static documents rather than dynamic tools, and without the ability to connect skills to opportunities, developmental paths, and business needs, even the most comprehensive skills inventory remains underutilized.
This visibility gap directly undermines internal mobility. Employees can’t navigate toward opportunities they can’t see, while managers miss candidates whose skills remain hidden. Organizations need a clear understanding of their current capabilities to strategically develop talent against future needs.
How forward-thinking companies are breaking through mobility barriers
The internal mobility crisis is solvable, as is apparent through leading organizations that are taking deliberate, strategic actions to overcome it.
They embrace fundamental shifts in how they conceptualize talent movement, foster visibility across organizational boundaries, and equip managers to facilitate rather than impede mobility.
Here is how.
Build career ecosystems, not just ladders
The first breakthrough comes from abandoning the mental model of career ladders in favor of career ecosystems.
Traditional career ladders are inherently limiting; they suggest a single path upward, with limited rungs and constrained movement. In contrast, career ecosystems embrace multidirectional movement, skill acquisition across domains, and diverse growth paths.
Allied Irish Banks (AIB) exemplifies this shift: In restructuring their approach to careers, they replaced a rigid, complex grading system with a more fluid career model based on capabilities, rather than titles. Their framework now emphasizes lateral movement across 12 career families, making potential career opportunities across the organization transparent, regardless of function, department, or division.
This multidirectional approach dramatically changes how employees conceptualize their careers. Instead of waiting for the next promotion within a narrow track, they can explore adjacent skills, cross-functional projects, and lateral moves that augment their capabilities in unexpected ways. The result isn’t just greater mobility—it’s richer career development that better serves both individual aspirations and organizational needs.
Career ecosystems also solve a mathematical problem inherent in traditional ladder models. In any organization, there are fewer positions at each ascending level. When upward movement is the only recognized form of progress, you cultivate an unsolvable equation of too many people competing for too few slots. By legitimizing and valuing lateral moves, skill expansion, and project-based experiences though, you produce exponentially more opportunities for meaningful development and contribution.
Avalere Health’s implementation of their career ecosystem demonstrates the business impact of this approach. As Vice President of Employee Experience Nick Holmes describes, “Fuel50 is fundamentally critical to our professional development strategy…. The people we’re competing with for the same talent pool won’t have anywhere near the same level of investment in career development.” That investment is paying off as well—they’re targeting a 98% retention rate, well above industry norms.
The ecosystem model requires a complete mental shift from viewing careers as linear progressions to seeing them as networks of interconnected opportunities. Doing so transforms how you structure roles, design development paths, and measure career success. Most importantly, it aligns with how work occurs in modern organizations: fluid, cross-functional, and increasingly project based.
Foster visibility where blindness once reigned
The second transformative approach focuses on opening radical visibility into skills, opportunities, and career paths. Leading organizations recognize that visibility is essential for internal mobility. Without it, even the best intentions and strategies won’t realize their full potential.
Visibility operates at multiple levels. At the most basic, employees need to see opportunities beyond their immediate department. RTI International addressed this fundamental need by phasing in a talent marketplace that connected employees across the company. Their tactic began with mentoring connections, expanded to leadership insights, and ultimately yielded transparent opportunities for career growth. This sequenced approach ensured employees could gradually expand their view of possibilities within the organization.
Beyond opportunity visibility lies skill visibility—the ability to identify, track, and match skills across organizational boundaries. KeyBank illustrates this principle in action: Their “Grow at Key” initiative uses AI-powered matching to make connections between employees’ skills and opportunities throughout the enterprise. Rather than relying on job titles or departmental designations, they’ve crafted a common language of skills that breaks free of organizational silos.
This skills-based visibility solves multiple problems simultaneously: It helps employees discover opportunities they might never have considered; it enables managers to find qualified internal candidates they wouldn’t otherwise know; and it gives the organization a dynamic view of its talent landscape, identifying both skill gaps and untapped potential.
Sophisticated organizations are going further by creating visibility into not only current skills but also future career paths. For instance, CarTrawler transformed their approach by giving employees “clear visibility into growth opportunities and potential career paths, opening an array of possibilities for them to progress within the company.” This forward-looking methodology helps employees make strategic developmental decisions today that position them for success tomorrow.
Empower managers to enable mobility
The third critical shift involves transforming managers from inadvertent obstacles into active enablers of mobility. This requires more than simple procedural changes or new tools—it demands a fundamental reorientation of the manager’s role and responsibilities.
Texas Health Resources exemplifies this: They shifted from a model where HR owned career development to one where managers are equipped and expected to facilitate growth. That alteration required both cultural and practical changes, including new capabilities, expectations, incentives, and tools.
The most effective organizations recognize that managers need both the will and the skill to drive mobility. Will comes from aligning incentives and changing the narrative around internal movement. When Texas Health Resources made talent development a core component of their leadership responsibility, they began to introduce the cultural expectation that managers would support, not hinder, internal mobility.
Skill comes from equipping managers with the tools, data, and capabilities they need to support mobility effectively. UCI’s leadership understood that dual requirement. They designed their talent strategy to be “employee-led and manager-supported” because, as EVP & Chief Information Officer Dean Kontul noted, “Employees have to own this.” Their balanced approach ensured managers had the tools to guide mobility without controlling it.
Future-ready organizations are creating new expectations and metrics around talent development. They evaluate managers not just on short-term team performance but also on their ability to develop and export talent to the broader organization. That adjustment transforms internal mobility from a competing priority to a core leadership responsibility.
This methodology mirrors a broader evolution in management from command-and-control leadership to coaching and enabling. As RTI International discovered, sometimes what talented employees need most isn’t more learning and development content but “more connectivity.” Managers who excel at creating these connections—to opportunities, development resources, and networks—become powerful enablers of both individual growth and organizational agility.
