Talent Mobility: From Career Development To Agility

ITM’s promise goes far beyond career development alone, it makes your company more agile

I've worked in organizations developing career management processes for over twenty years. But I’ve noticed the following problem with traditional career development methods: managers see employees only in terms of the skills they have to do their current job. They rarely know (or remember) skills employees developed in previous jobs that are not relevant to their current role; nor do they know skills they may have through their interests and hobbies.
 

Furthermore, managers have very little ability to see beyond the opportunities within their own team or function. This limited perspective doesn’t allow employees to develop except in one silo. Managers have a little line of sight into how to leverage employees’ skills in other parts of the organization in ways that could help them to achieve their career development goals while contributing to the organization’s needs.

Internal talent mobility has traditionally referred to moving employees to new roles in order to facilitate learning. However, given today’s talent marketplace technologies, we now have the ability to break jobs into projects and then allow employees to opt-in to projects where their skills and contributions are needed the most. While ITM can still facilitate career development, it can do much more than that.

Internal Talent Mobility And Agility

The ability to know your talent so thoroughly that you can move people to those projects where you most need them is a key capability for the future of work, given the relentless pace of change.

During the pandemic, we learned that business conditions and related priorities can turn on a dime. Customer demand for a new feature, or a new competitor entering the marketplace, requires no less agility. Internal talent mobility is an approach that enables you to quickly respond to changing business dynamics.

Further, ITM helps you to develop the skills you need in-house, without the need for expensive hiring cycles. By giving employees access to project-based work on other teams, while keeping their ‘day jobs,’ you enable learning. You expose your people to new situations and new mentors that enable you to upskill employees in the flow of work.

Leveraging an internal talent marketplace can also facilitate greater equity and inclusion. Managers can draw the skills they need from a pool larger than their own team, function, or business group. This means that managers are looking more at competencies than the politics of who has them or how well-known an employee is internally. You’ve seen organizations where the same favorites got most of the opportunities. It was who you know, not what you know. Internal talent mobility opens up those valuable opportunities to more people. It helps foster equal opportunity across the organization.

Also, research says that only about one-third of employees are fully engaged at work. That means that most companies are leaving productivity on the table because two-thirds of employees are not fully engaged, and research tells us that engaged employees are more productive.

Talent mobility has the potential to help employees tap into their interests and their passions, by enabling them to work on projects of their own choosing. It increases engagement, which boosts productivity. Employees receive career development and learning, while managers receive more engaged, more passionate employees.

Implementing an Internal Talent Mobility Strategy

How can organizations implement an ITM strategy? The first step is to know what skills you have. Most organizations do not have an inventory that captures the totality of skills they have in-house. A complete accounting of your internal talent includes not only the skills people have to do their jobs – but what people can do or want to do.

As much as possible, an ITM strategy requires dividing the work you do into projects and then identifying the skill sets necessary for each of them. Finally, you need the means to connect projects with the people who have the required skills, no matter where in the organization they work.

Fortunately, the enabling technologies for ITM have come a long way. There are now technologies that will ingest a LinkedIn profile, a resume, or what's already in your human capital management system, as a basis for a skills inventory. And then employees can improve this inventory by adding or modifying the skills in their profile. Smart technologies will even prompt employees regarding related skills that they may have forgotten.

With a comprehensive inventory in place, managers can then input both the skills required for specific roles or projects and the needed skill level. These tools can then connect the right person, at the right skill level, to the right project.

Developing Adjacent Skills

Internal talent mobility tools can also help people to develop adjacent skills. For example, it’s obvious that a programmer fluent in one language would have an easier time learning to code in another than someone who’s not a programmer at all.

Your employees have a host of skills that are adjacent to the ones you need, even if these skills don’t appear on their resumes. Using an AI-driven talent marketplace, you can upskill more quickly by leveraging these adjacencies.

This means that talent mobility technology connects employees to learning opportunities. It can connect them to other people they can learn from, people outside of their team or function they might never have come across otherwise. Thus, ITM fosters a learning organization.

It's About Change Management And Not Just Tech

Talent marketplace technology vendors will tell you that their solutions have reached the point where implementing ITM is as easy as flipping a switch. You can approach the implementation in this manner if you are using it only to allow employees to opt-in to projects in addition to their full-time role.

But the real power of this technology is that it helps you to change the way you distribute work. You must first convince managers to allow their employees to volunteer to work on projects outside of their normal jobs for at least a few hours a week. Managers must understand that there is value for their own team in an exchange of skills. Managers come to find that, in the internal talent marketplace, they receive as much as they give.

Internal talent mobility also means that your organization must think not in terms of jobs, but in terms of skills that are associated with projects. The selling point for employees here is that you’re no longer limiting them to contributing to the organization’s success by tying them to a specific job. You are allowing them to use all of their skills, passions, and their interests to deliver value to the company.

Changing from a mindset of talent scarcity to one of talent abundance is no small task. It requires change management and a commitment from senior leaders.

Talent Mobility: Giving Access To A Gold Mine

You’re sitting on a gold mine of talent. All you have to do is allow your employees to bring their full selves to work – all of their skills and experience. Then, simply give them access to new opportunities that are already happening within your company.

An internal talent marketplace helps you to identify the expertise you have in-house, and exponentially improve it while accelerating the pace of work. Along the way, employees have access to career development opportunities without looking for a new job. Even a few hours a week spent on a team outside of their usual space can enhance learning and productivity.

But talent mobility isn’t only about career development – it’s also about agility. It’s the organizational magic that can help companies become more effective.

Author Bio

Edie L. Goldberg, Ph.D. is the Founder of E. L. Goldberg & Associates and is a future of work expert and talent management consultant based in Menlo Park, CA. She is the co-author of The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Unleashes Organizational Capacity (Wonderwell, CA). Connect Edie L. Goldberg