Top 6 Steps to Create a Talent Mobility Strategy

In today's fast-moving world, staying ahead means getting the most out of your workforce. Platforms like iMocha make this possible by enabling talent mobility - helping employees discover new roles within the company while driving overall growth.

A talent mobility strategy is a great tactic to keep up with the industries’ demanding changes. It offers employees ample growth opportunities while keeping organizations flexible to move talents internally as needed.

Talent mobility is a great way to close skill gaps, promote innovation, and build future leaders. In this blog, we will learn more about this strategy for well-informed decisions.

What is a Talent Mobility Strategy?

A talent mobility strategy is a plan that helps in talent management and development. Organizations assess employees’ skills and capabilities and help them move into existing roles within the organization. The strategy helps meet the organization’s changing needs.

This can involve lateral moves, internal promotions, job rotations, cross-functional team tasks, and geographic relocations. Here are six steps to create a talent mobility strategy for transitions based on skills.

Top 6 Steps to Create a Talent Mobility Strategy 

A talent mobility strategy requires planning, preparation, implementation, and regular adjustments. Let’s explore the detailed steps for it.

1. Define Organizational Objectives

Understand the organization’s goals, objectives, priorities, and direction. These can be only the current year’s goals or long-term ones.

Does the organization want to expand to new markets, try new technologies, take up new projects, or new products? Pinpoint the goal to identify necessary skills, expertise, and talents.

Certain skill gaps may appear in the organization over time. Clear objectives help recognize and mitigate these gaps by mobilizing internal employees.

Resolve uncertainties about future skill demands and build an agile workforce with iMocha’s vast skills assessment. This feature helps understand the potential of existing and potential talent and upskill or reskill talent as needed!

2. Assess Current Workforce Skills

Conduct exhaustive skills assessments to evaluate the current workforce’s existing skills and capabilities with appropriate skills assessment tools.

Use performance review tools to identify employees’ areas for improvement. Use employee survey tools to learn about employee satisfaction and whether the organization can better guide them. 

These evaluations can identify employees’ existing skills and significant skill gaps. Organizations can recognize employees skilled enough for mobility and take suitable measures to prepare them for better opportunities. 

This step helps businesses plan and decide appropriately to meet future organizational demands in terms of career development.

For instance, IT companies can assess the workforce to seek employees with cloud computing skills. If they find employees with great potential and minimal skill gaps, they can enroll them in upskilling training.

On the other hand, those who already have sufficient proficiency can be selected for leadership roles. This helps build a prepared workforce while offering growth opportunities to employees.

3. Develop Internal Talent Pools

The most important step is creating and cultivating the organization’s internal talent pool.

Identify all the employees with great potential to move up to key positions but need guidance, e.g., mentoring and training. Make sure the chosen talent pool has employees with diverse experiences, skills, and backgrounds.

Create a detailed career path for employees across teams. This will include a roadmap of how employees can progress in the organization based on skills. Organizations, in this way, promote employee growth and boost motivation.

4. Promote Career Development Opportunities

Another significant strategy is providing the right career development opportunities to the talent pool, which aligns with the chosen employees and the organization’s goals.

For starters, implement the focussed initiatives for employee upskilling. These may include addressing any skill gaps, leadership development, cross-department collaboration, mentorship, and skills that they lack to prepare employees' talents for their ultimate roles.

Moreover, 64% of L&D professionals believe that reskilling is another important part of filling skill gaps. Create a detailed skills profile for the chosen employee and outline their proficiency levels on a scale of 1 to 10 against each required skill. This will help identify significant skill gaps.

Based on the results, tailor learning and development programs with on-the-job training, targeted workshops, and certification courses.

5. Develop a Culture of Mobility

Promote a culture of continuous learning and development within the organization. This will encourage the chosen talents and others to upskill themselves. They will consider internal mobility a career growth strategy.

For this, senior leaders and managers must be vocal about advocating for talent mobility to their teams and highlight why they must consider it.

This will ensure the employees know that the organization values all employees and prioritizes them for internal key roles.

Next, inform employees of all possible opportunities for talent mobility. Communicate this through company-wide town halls, newsletters, email portals, or other internal communication tools.

Managers must actively identify talented employees based on their skill profiles and refer them for talent mobility. When team members notice this, they’ll work harder to grow in their respective fields and seize any future opportunities.

6. Measure and Evaluate

Measure and monitor the talent mobility strategy's success regularly. Track significant metrics, including retention rates, time-to-fill positions, employee engagement, and the comparison of internal mobility vs. external hires.

Get feedback from the employees chosen for internal mobility. Based on their experiences, address potential challenges and improve the strategy. 

Benefits of Talent Mobility Strategy

The right talent mobility strategy offers several benefits to both the organization and the talents, as follows:

1. Retaining Top Talent

The strategy offers career development opportunities to top talents. This keeps them engaged, increases retention rate, and reduces employee turnover. This also reduces the organization’s expenses by eliminating external recruitment needs. 79% of L&D leaders also cite internal mobility as a less expensive move.

It enhances employee loyalty. Conversely, a lack of career growth and progression caused 40% of employees to leave between April 2021 and April 2023. This strategy preserves institutional knowledge and experience. Thus, the organization doesn’t lose the talent it invested in and ensures continued service and no workflow disruption, contributing to the company’s success.

It also fortifies company culture since long-term employees become future mentors and advocates. 

2. Enhanced Employee Development

Talent mobility strategies help employees apply their skills to new projects and roles, gaining experience and improving their expertise. The approach helps them grow in their desired fields while gaining practical knowledge.

Diverse assignments refine their abilities while serving organizational goals, creating a win-win situation for employees and the business.

As employees gain exposure to cross-functional projects and develop, they become more flexible and adaptable in the long run. They are prepared to take on diverse roles and support the organization.

3. Better Succession Planning

Talent mobility training and development programs prepare employees to assume key positions whenever needed, strengthening succession planning.

It’s said that 64% of businesses have succession plans, offering the organization a competitive advantage over the rest.

Employees’ readiness to fill roles can be tracked through an increase in internal promotion rates and bench strength.

The organization will always have leaders to fill in during sudden vacancies, ensuring leadership continuity and minimizing disruptions.

Additionally, this strategy promotes diversity in leadership roles by developing talents from varied backgrounds, departments, and skills. This is evident through metrics like diversity ratios in leadership and promotion rates by demographic.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) boost innovative thinking, inclusive decisions, and better collaboration. Diverse management can help earn up to 19% more revenue! 

The company stands out as fair, making it more attractive to not just stakeholders but also potential hires.

This is essential if the organization needs to fill an empty role immediately or plans to hire soon. Want to reduce the time to hire? Make the process smoother by using iMocha’s AI Skills Inference tool that helps organizations make data-driven decisions.

5. Promotes a Learning Culture

Talent mobility includes continuous training and development and knowledge sharing, which builds a learning culture within the organization. This is evident through increased training completion rates and skill utilization.

Moreover, a Deloitte report shows that a learning culture helps organizations because they are 92% more likely to build innovative products and processes.

Employees become adaptable to market changes and demands, building a growth mindset in them. It also improves employee performance and makes the workforce resilient.

Conclusion

Organizations can unlock the full potential of their workforce by embracing a culture of continuous learning, providing ample opportunities for growth, and taking a strategic approach to talent management.

However, the challenges associated with ineffective career pathing cannot be ignored. High attrition rates, widening skill gaps, ESG compliance pressures, and the need for future skills are significant obstacles that must be addressed. By investing in robust talent mobility programs, organizations can not only mitigate these challenges but also position themselves for long-term success.

Make the process simpler with iMocha’s AI-driven platform. Using its skill assessment, personalized learning, and development tools, streamline every step and make talent mobility a stress-free endeavor.

Schedule your demo today and plan the best talent mobility strategy!

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FAQs

Why is talent mobility important for organizations?

Talent mobility helps organizations quickly adapt to market changes, retain the best talent, and increase employee engagement. It also fills skill gaps, increases workforce flexibility, and develops future leaders.

How can organizations identify employees for talent mobility?

Organizations can identify employees for talent mobility by evaluating their skills proficiency via different types of assessment, which include tech, non-tech, cognitive, and many more. iMocha offers a 3000+ comprehensive library of ready-to-use tests that can help evaluate talents.

What tools can support talent mobility?

Skill assessments, Skills Intelligence platforms, learning management systems, performance review tools, and employee feedback tools are the best tools for supporting talent mobility.

These help organizations assess and recognize top employees and personalize their learning opportunities according to business needs, helping them achieve more.