David Landman |
For years, companies have talked about internal mobility as if it were easy and available to everyone, with clear next steps to progress upwards into roles of increased scope, complexity, and seniority. But careers don’t work that way anymore. Neither do organizations.
What employees more often experience today is actually closer to a maze, with the exits often clearly marked and internal pathways hidden from view. I learned this firsthand while leading talent development inside a large global organization that prided itself on strong career development and mobility — and the reality was that more work needed to be done to ensure that the vision aligned with the lived day-to-day experiences of the employees.
As we dug into the problem, we realized a lot of people were leaving us because they simply couldn’t find a way to grow internally. Like it often is the case, the problem was rooted deeply in existing systems and culture, not in any single process or tool we could easily change or replace. People lacked clear ways to connect to opportunity, and we needed to rethink how the entire system supported that. The work we undertook to fix this was hard, but it was also very doable when we focused on making the constraints visible, aligning incentives, and redesigning career pathways over time.
In the end, the journey taught me a great deal about what enables mobility, what blocks it, and how to lead change in an environment that often resists it.
Here are the six lessons that mattered most.
1. Employees often know mobility is broken long before leaders do.
Through exit surveys and direct conversations, we heard the same message again and again: “It’s easier to get a job outside the company than inside.”
People weren’t leaving because they lacked ambition or loyalty. They were leaving because:
They couldn’t see open roles;
They didn’t know which skills they needed for those roles;
Internal systems made applying difficult; and
Policies unintentionally discouraged exploration.
What struck me most was what I would call an “emotional gap”: At one end, leaders genuinely believed in the promise of a culture rooted in internal mobility and assumed that opportunity existed. At the other, employees felt anxious, frustrated, and unsure where — or whether — they could grow next. That disconnect became the spark that pushed us to rethink mobility entirely.
2. Talent hoarding is real — and often rational.
One of the hardest truths we had to confront was that managers often operate from a mindset of talent scarcity, which leads to behaviors like hoarding talent. Not because they are territorial, but because backfilling roles is often too slow and too painful. When a manager’s performance depends on their team’s performance, holding onto people becomes a survival strategy. But the net effect is stagnancy for both the employee and the organization.
3. Visibility is the currency of mobility.
Most employees suffer not from a skills gap but a “visibility gap”.
Time after time, I’ve seen employees thrive in new roles they would never have thought to pursue prospectively. Looking back, those moves made perfect sense despite the fact that the systems weren’t designed to surface or support them. The problem was that this clarity only emerged in retrospect. Unexpected pathways like these remained opaque, which made any success feel more accidental than by design. That realization pushed us to rethink how we could make opportunity more visible and mobility more intentional for others.
The turning point came when we realized we had to do more than give people permission to move; we had to give them information.
Employees need to know:
What jobs exist;
What skills those jobs require;
What skills they already have;
How to develop the skills they needed; and
How to take the next step.
It may seem like table stakes to say, but when people see pathways, they move. When they don’t, they leave.
4. Leaders experience mobility differently — and that matters.
One of my earliest learnings was what Dr. Shonna Waters calls the “altitude sickness” problem. Senior leaders genuinely believed mobility was working well because it worked for them. They themselves were tapped, sponsored, and guided. They had visibility into opportunities that most employees never saw. They were the chosen few. But the experience for everyone else was quite different.
To change the system, we first had to change the lens. We brought leaders real employee stories and real friction points — not the sanitized summaries they normally saw. That meant hearing directly from employees who were performing well but couldn’t get clarity on how to move laterally, or managers who quietly blocked internal moves because they feared losing strong team members. Seeing those stories side by side made the disconnect impossible to ignore and helped leaders understand the urgency for change.
This was an ah-hah moment for us, and for them. No mobility transformation works until leaders feel the friction employees feel.
5. New platforms and policies are great. But the biggest impacts come through changing people’s perspectives.
When I first took on the challenge, I thought I had the answer. My team and I wrote a lengthy document outlining solutions. Instead of using it, though, we tucked it in a drawer.
The reason is that mobility, at its core, is a business problem, not an HR problem. Business leaders needed to shape the solution themselves.
To turn insight into action, any approach we took had to acknowledge that mobility barriers show up differently depending on where people sit in the organization. So, we created three groups:
Senior executives,
Managers, and
Individual contributors.
Week after week, we tackled one barrier at a time. Leaders debated and designed the answers. They didn’t always agree, but the business owned the outcome — and that ownership was the unlock.
What emerged was a three-part solution:
Pillar 1: A true internal talent marketplace
We needed to rival the external talent marketplaces. We needed a system where employees could surface their skills, understand role requirements, and apply easily. If LinkedIn made external mobility seamless, our internal platform needed to do the same.
Pillar 2: Simple, humane policies
Our policies were as contradictory as they were confusing. In some cases, eligibility requirements for newly opened internal roles were unclear or inconsistently applied; in other cases, lateral moves were treated as career setbacks rather than wise career pivots and legitimate professional development. Fixing this meant enabling more movement for our people while still balancing business continuity with career growth. We needed to clarify when and how people could move, aligning expectations across teams, and remove punitive rules that discouraged role-exploration across the organization. The goal was not to enable mobility at all costs but rather to create a system that made growth possible without forcing employees to choose between progress and stability.
Pillar 3: Manager and leader behavior change
This was 90% of the work. We had to reward managers who developed talent and moved people, not those who kept teams static. Managers who supported mobility became magnets for great people. Managers who didn’t face higher attrition, weaker pipelines, and increasing difficulty attracting top talent.
6. The marketplace model works.
A marketplace reframes mobility from “losing someone” to participating in a talent ecosystem.
When people move:
Teams gain access to broader talent.
Employees gain access to new pathways.
Ideas cross-pollinate across the business.
Siloes break down.
Retention improves because growth becomes possible.
Organizations like Mastercard, for example, have shown what happens when these systems take hold. Their internal marketplace, led by Heather Yurko and her team, unlocked over a million hours of productivity by matching hidden skills to real business needs.
Closing the mobility gap
Companies often talk about talent shortages as problems that can only be solved by recruiting talent from outside their walls. But what most have is really a mobility shortage — a system that makes external movement easy and internal movement hard.
A modern talent marketplace flips that equation. It gives employees visibility, agency, and opportunity at the moment they need it. And it gives companies access to the talent they already have.
Mobility is not a ladder anymore. It’s a marketplace. And the sooner companies build it, the stronger their talent — and their future — will be.
