Talent Mobility: What It Is and How It Impacts Your Company

Key takeaways

Talent mobility encompasses the strategies you use to identify employees within your organization who can successfully fill internal roles. 

• Types of internal talent mobility include vertical, horizontal, and cross-functional moves. 

• When developing a talent mobility strategy, consider aligning company objectives with individual goals, investing in talent development, and securing C-suite support.

• You can leverage talent mobility strategies to increase employee engagement, retention, and productivity.

Learn what talent mobility is, why it is valuable, and the best practices for developing a talent mobility strategy. To further maximize your company’s competitive advantage when it comes to training and development, explore Coursera for Business and its expert-led courses, tailored learning paths, and AI tools designed to drive workforce growth.

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What is talent mobility?

Talent mobility refers to the intentional strategies you use to identify employees within your organization who have outgrown their current role and would suit a new position. When you support your employees’ professional development, it benefits their growth. If you don’t have measures in place to identify employees who need a new challenge or could better serve your business in another area, you risk potential employee turnover.

Actively supporting talent mobility can help you improve employee engagement. In this tight labor market, talent mobility can also help your business's bottom line. You can hire internally more quickly rather than competing to attract and recruit new talent. This offers the added advantage of having employees who already know your company culture and can bring institutional knowledge to their new role.

Types of internal talent mobility

You have options, including internal, global, and virtual, for incorporating talent mobility into your talent management strategy. If, for instance, you choose to focus on internal talent mobility to address staffing gaps in your company, consider the following types of internal moves:

Vertical mobility

Promotion to another organizational hierarchy level with a different level of responsibility counts as vertical mobility. Putting someone who supervised a team of four into a position to lead three teams of four is an example of vertical mobility.

Horizontal mobility

With this type of talent mobility, also known as lateral mobility, an employee’s role changes, but they retain the same organizational hierarchy level. You might have someone in accounting, for instance, train in a different responsibility to expand their role.

Cross-functional mobility 

Cross-functional mobility occurs when you transfer an employee to a new department or business unit to leverage their skills. For example, you might move a project manager from the Midwest sales region to the Southeast marketing region.

Benefits of implementing talent mobility solutions

Talent mobility helps your employees. When you identify people for internal hiring and work to develop those employees’ skills, they grow professionally. At the same time, your employees may feel more invested in your organization as they feel valued and respected.

Talent mobility also builds employee confidence and makes them more likely to accept new challenges. Having succeeded in one branch, for instance, they can feel more secure when trying to expand their role at another.

Additionally, by increasing job satisfaction, talent mobility directly impacts engagement, which can improve retention. A study of more than 150 million job title transitions between 2015 and 2024 found that employees who made at least one move within their company had a tenure of 8.1 years, compared with 5.8 years for those who didn’t make any internal moves [1]. Seeing a career path and feeling encouraged to grow within a company are as essential to recruiting and retaining employees as compensation and benefits.

This benefits your business by fostering a more loyal and invested workforce. Offering employees lateral moves can be an untapped gold mine for your company, with potential benefits such as:

• Higher employee engagement and retention

• Improved gender equity

• Continuation of institutional knowledge

• Less time spent onboarding

• Increased overall productivity

• Enhanced competitiveness

All of this adds up to cost savings and a better bottom line. You cut the time and money spent recruiting and attracting new candidates. Plus, you can onboard and train internal employees for their roles more rapidly since they're already familiar with your organization, which benefits productivity and efficiency.

Challenges of talent mobility

According to the same job title transitions analysis, only 24 percent of the transitions that occurred over the nine-year period, from 2015 to 2024, were internal moves [1]. Thus, although internal transitions have increased slightly each year since 2015 in proportion to all transitions, identifying the right internal candidates to fill open roles remains a challenge in talent mobility [1]. This problem can stem from a lack of manager buy-in. If your team leaders and supervisors aren’t looking for people to transfer or promote, they may assume they need to hire externally to fill their openings. 

Effective talent mobility also requires transparency and consistency. It’s important to avoid only providing mobility based on specific judgments, past experiences, or to specific groups. Adopting a talent-based or skills-based hiring approach can help combat bias.

Read more: How Leadership Development Drives Meaningful Change

Best practices for developing a talent mobility strategy

To benefit from talent mobility, you’ll need to intentionally establish a program supporting internal moves, whether horizontal or vertical. Following these strategies in creating a talent mobility program can help.

Align company objectives and individual goals.

Assessing your current talent pool to identify essential positions and skills gaps that must be filled to meet your company's objectives can help you determine a focus for training and hiring. Additionally, understanding what your employees aim to accomplish and mapping a potential career path that aligns with your business objectives and their professional goals can benefit both parties. Employees feel more connected to your company and aware of development opportunities. At the same time,  your leadership team can build a talent mobility network and identify the development opportunities needed to meet both employee and organizational goals.

Invest in talent development.

Building your talent pool requires active investment in training and development. Knowing your ultimate goals for talent management, look for ways to identify and fill skill gaps to avoid having to turn to external hiring for all your vacancies.

The percentage of employees who report that their managers encouraged them to spend time learning, challenged them to learn new skills, or helped them build a career development plan decreased by six percent, five percent, and five percent, respectively, from 2024 to 2025[2]. This is something you can change by focusing on developing both technical and workplace skills. That way, you’re maintaining relationships as well as professional expertise. 

Educate your employees about opportunities.  Your internal candidates must know about the job to apply for that lateral or vertical move. Preparing them to advance with appropriate skills and talent development is critical. However, you must also communicate about internal mobility opportunities and ensure staff know where to find out about new roles.

Enlist C-suite support.

Talent mobility bottlenecks arise when leadership fails to transfer or promote internal employees. Your managers play an important role in talent development and mobility. Building a talent marketplace that tracks employee skills, qualifications, goals, and more can help your company match people with open roles more effectively.

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