Highlights:

1. Employees must develop skills, and obtain new ones, while moving around a company.
2. Digital transformation is enabling talent management and people managers to make informed decisions.
3. Traditional HR practices were largely missing awareness of roles, skills, competencies, overall career ambitions, etc.

In the halcyon days of internal mobility, a person’s career journey would look a little something like this: an employee gets hired into the company and works diligently in the same role for several years before getting tapped on the shoulder for a new position. This is largely how it went until the employee retired or went somewhere else.

Adding to the stroll down memory lane, employers used to post job descriptions that included competencies that were cherry-picked from a book.

Those may seem like the “good old days” to some people; they were anything but that. Largely missing from this all-too-common scenario is an awareness of roles, skills, competencies, proficiencies, titles, experience, and overall career ambitions.

That was the way human resources (HR) used to work. Internal employees were largely moved around based on a “who’s up next?” mentality and a few managerial scribblings on a performance review.

What Were HR Leaders Thinking Back Then?

Along comes digital transformation, and with it came a new awareness of skills and roles. Companies can no longer write down competencies by job the way they used to because there are now more than four hundred thousand skills people need to be effective in a range of jobs.

Now, if they are not quite ready for change, they must face the music, as 1 out of 3 people will leave their employer if they are not given ample room for career development or appropriately enabled for personal upskilling.

Where companies once made it easy for external candidates to know about roles and apply for them – but struggled to achieve the same for internal employees – now technology is making insight-rich data available and creating a strong foundation. With this comes context that enables talent management and people managers to make more informed decisions through a deeper level of personalization that guides employees in the right direction.

Empowered talent also benefits by charting their own paths within an organization instead of relying on someone else to do it for them.

The results have been nothing short of incredible.

“We Have to Fix This”

Effie Gikas, Sr. Director, Enterprise Talent Enablement at The Cigna Group, realized that the tools Cigna recruiters were using had historically been focused on external candidates.

“I thought, wait a minute. We have 70,000 colleagues here at Cigna, and we have got to be able to have a better way to make it easier for them to be aware of internal roles,” she said in a recent webinar.

To illustrate her point, Effie flashed back to an interview she had with an internal Cigna applicant for a recruitment marketing vacancy. It required marketing skills over more traditional HR skills.

The applicant, Gikas discovered, found the requisition on LinkedIn.

“She says, I would have never found this job internally. I didn’t even know that you could apply marketing skills to an HR job,” Gikas recalled the applicant saying. The first thought that came to Gikas’s mind was, “Oh my gosh, we have to fix this.”

And she did fix it.

Employing an intelligent talent marketplace gradually transformed the company into a skills-based organization with a 'learn-evolve-grow' mindset.

Today, each employee has about 24 skills listed, and Cigna has identified 33,000 unique skills in total. “Now we’ve got these great insights,” said Gikas.

Last April, for example, Cigna launched a career portal that includes a job board. It offers recommendations based on alignment to skills, interests, and experiences. Within that is the ability to network, so people can see which of their colleagues possess a skill they want to develop.

The next step in Cigna’s evolution will be extending projects and gigs to its employees.

“Your manager stays the same, your comp [compensation] stays the same, your job title stays the same,” said Gikas. “You’re going to take this assignment on top of your current job to gain these additional skills and experiences.”

Finding Purpose Through Profession

For employees, developing skills and obtaining new ones while moving around a company is about more than a raise, according to a survey of 3,000 U.S. workers conducted by Workplace Intelligence and Amazon. It is about better work-life balance and finding a sense of purpose.

The data also uncovered that while 78% of employees say that their company’s learning and development programs have benefited them, many people do not have access to the programs they want the most.

Just over half of employees say their company offers free or partially covered college tuition, training programs in other areas of the business, and networking opportunities. More than 8 out of 10 employees say it is important for their employer to offer these benefits, the research showed.

That puts the onus on companies, many of whom are struggling to hold on to talent. More than 4 million people voluntarily left their jobs in December of 2022, according to the most recent federal statistics, continuing a consecutive streak of more than a year in which quits totaled 4 million in a given month.

Job openings, meanwhile, inched up to more than 11 million at the end of last year.

The numbers are clear: employees feel more empowered than ever to seek out an employer that supports their long-term career goals and growth ambitions.

Where Does the Technology Go from Here?

For starters, we will see a wider variety of learning experiences. Employees will have smaller, micro-training/micro-learning options, including cohort-based learning and audio-based learning (similar to podcasts).

We will see more companies leverage data and technology to personalize learning/training by:
1. Using skills technology to understand talent supply and demand across the enterprise
2. Using AI matching to identify skill gaps and recommend the right courses/experiences to fill those gaps

Better efforts will be undertaken to connect employees with mentors internally – those who came before them, who possess competencies, skills, proficiencies, and experience that lends itself well to supporting another’s career path.

These connections will be forged using intelligence that draws upon the employee data that talent management practitioners and managers have at their disposal. In this way, technology will facilitate meaningful connections that show significant promise to positively impact career progression.

There will be more gig-based work and job-sharing to help employees gain new skills. They could get credit and gain valuable experience for taking on new projects, thus boosting their chances of advancing their careers.

Learning and development will also be closely tied to business goals. Granted, this might be an assumption, but given recent trends where companies scrutinize productivity and spending, learning and upskilling will be much more intentional in the months to come.

Not many people stay in the same domain their whole life anymore. So opening up opportunities for employees to try new things while using the skills they have is part of building a great career.

More and more companies are basically telling their people “stop looking for a promotion.” It is not that they do not want their workers to advance; it is because they do.

Instead of employees applying or waiting to be considered for jobs inside of the company (the old-fashioned way), employers want people to bounce around and learn how the company works from the inside out first. That is what the future of career advancement is going to look like.

Ultimately, people will engage more when they know that it is going to benefit them in the long run.

Author Bio

John Harrington, Jr. is Director, Product Marketing, at Phenom.

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