Internal Mobility Crisis? You’re Not Alone — Survey Shows 42% Struggle

If your organization is grappling with any of the above challenges, you’re facing an internal mobility crisis, and our data shows you’re far from alone.

In a recent survey of over 300 HR leaders, a striking 42% reported significant struggles with internal mobility despite acknowledging its critical importance to their talent strategy.

While the broader skills crisis has many contributing factors, our research has identified three primary root causes that specifically undermine internal mobility efforts. These systemic barriers persist even in organizations with substantial HR investments and well-intentioned leadership.

In this article, we’ll examine these core issues and, more importantly, reveal how forward-thinking organizations are successfully overcoming them.

Why your internal mobility efforts keep hitting invisible walls

Contrary to popular belief, the root causes of poor internal mobility aren’t budget constraints or a lack of executive buy-in.

Instead, our research reveals the most significant barriers are managerial practices that inadvertently block talent flow, outdated HR technologies that reinforce organizational silos, and fundamental gaps in skills visibility.

These everyday factors create the perfect storm that prevents talent from moving where it’s needed most.

Your management unintentionally creates barriers to mobility

The first culprit in the internal mobility crisis is unconscious managerial behaviors that stagnate talent.

This opposition manifests in several ways: Managers, often incentivized by short-term team performance metrics, naturally protect their high performers from opportunities elsewhere within the organization. When a promising team member expresses interest in another role, many managers view it as a threat rather than a win for the overall company.

At KeyBank, before their mobility transformation, they discovered what many organizations experience: Departmental silos had created talent islands where skills and potential remained locked in place.

The irony is that most managers don’t consciously block mobility; they simply lack the tools, incentives, and cultural support to facilitate it.

Your current HR technology reinforces rather than removes silos

The second root cause of the internal mobility crisis lies in technology—specifically, HR systems that were designed to maintain organizational structures rather than transcend them.

Most organizations invest heavily in HR technology, yet these solutions often entrench the very problem they should solve.

But this technological infrastructure typically suffers from being built around organizational charts and job titles rather than skills and capabilities.

Each business unit maintains its own talent data, uses different terminology to describe similar skills, and lacks visibility into capabilities outside its immediate sphere.

Your skills visibility is limited (you can’t see, you can’t develop)

The third fundamental barrier—and perhaps the most insidious—is limited visibility into skills across your organization.

You can’t develop, deploy, or leverage what you cannot see. Yet, most organizations have a fragmented understanding of their employees’ skills at best.

This skills blindness produces a vicious cycle wherein, without clear visibility into existing capabilities, organizations can’t effectively identify gaps, target development, or match talent to relevant opportunities.

How forward-thinking companies are breaking through mobility barriers

The internal mobility crisis is solvable, as is apparent through leading organizations that are taking deliberate, strategic actions to overcome it.

Build career ecosystems, not just ladders

The first breakthrough comes from abandoning the mental model of career ladders in favor of career ecosystems.

Career ecosystems embrace multidirectional movement, skill acquisition across domains, and diverse growth paths.

Allied Irish Banks (AIB) exemplifies this shift: In restructuring their approach to careers, they replaced a rigid, complex grading system with a more fluid career model based on capabilities, rather than titles.

Foster visibility where blindness once reigned

The second transformative approach focuses on opening radical visibility into skills, opportunities, and career paths.

Leading organizations recognize that visibility is essential for internal mobility. Without it, even the best intentions and strategies won’t realize their full potential.

Empower managers to enable mobility

The third critical shift involves transforming managers from inadvertent obstacles into active enablers of mobility. This requires more than simple procedural changes or new tools—it demands a fundamental reorientation of the manager’s role and responsibilities.