Picture this: Your team member communicated that they desire to grow their career horizontally instead of vertically. With talent mobility in place, your organization can help that person grow into their new desired role and minimize attrition. Talent mobility’s basic principle is agility; this means examining technologists’ skills, highlighting the organization’s needs, and quickly executing responses. Without talent mobility, organizations cannot promptly respond to industry changes and disruptions like the 2020 pandemic.
So, how can organizations support talent mobility?
Innovating for the future requires data-driven and people-first decisions to ensure individuals and teams can complete a project or goal. Nurture your internal and external talent pipelines by exploring and examining data and:
Upskilling opportunities and initiatives
Technologists career aspirations
Talent mobility that supports vertical and horizontal growth
Critical roles where skills gaps present the most significant risk to your organizations
Supporting vertical growth and horizontal growth is one way to support talent mobility. Traditionally, organizations and people focused on the former to measure a successful career. However, vertical growth has limitations; it only allows for career growth within a person’s current role.
Horizontal growth, on the other hand, prepares employees for creating value. It allows them to seek new ways to contribute to the organization without limitation. It also promotes continuing education, upskilling, coaching/mentoring and, most importantly, prepares employees to pivot to new roles—without skills gaps—that your organization may need in the future.
Not being able to fill roles when needed can handicap an organization.
Enabling talent mobility cultivates talent pipelines. Current employees are still an organization’s greatest asset, and leveraging their talent helps future-proof roles and organizational outcomes.
The results of your investments are measurable by your employee retention.
If retention is the culmination of your investments efforts—and, more importantly, indicative of the employee experience at your organization—then the employee experience is just as valuable as the customer experience because the employee experience is the perfect metric for attrition.
We mean that satisfied employees—employees who feel valued and invested in—are less likely to leave the company in search of greener pastures. Yes, compensation is also a factor, but if an employee feels valued, they are more likely to stay and continue growing vertically and horizontally.
