Reflecting on the current state of the labor market, a recent article from Gartner stated that “organizations are struggling to keep and acquire in-demand talent.” This is due to tough economic conditions being faced across the world in addition to the skills crisis that was already hampering businesses — in some industries more urgently than others. This situation has led many organizations to think hard about what they need to do differently as they are unable to hire their way out of trouble as they may have done before.

The phenomenon of “quiet hiring” has been used to describe the strategic placement — and development — of talent from within an organization to where there is the greatest need, even if the employees being assigned to a new role (or being given new responsibilities) are only partially skilled or experienced in the required areas. This requires periods of assimilation and development in order for any individual to fully take on the role, even if that’s only for a finite period of time.

Of course, this benefits more than just the organization. It was stated in Forbes recently that organizations need to think differently about talent in order to retain their best employees. In a recent survey of 15,000 U.S. workers, “61 percent said that the opportunity to add new skills is an extremely or very important factor in deciding whether to stay at their current job.” So, what started as a necessary measure for the business also ends up benefiting the individual. The article explains, “Companies that make significant investments in training can build workforce skills more systematically—and employees who are learning are more likely to be engaged and want to stay.”

L&D Teams Can Be Crucial — But Not By Repeating Past Mistakes

This situation should be the domain of learning and development (L&D) departments. However, some L&D teams have fallen short in the past at turning investments in learning and supporting technologies into demonstrable results. The over-emphasis on delivering courses and providing an abundance of online content over addressing the actual needs of the organization and its employees has left many wondering what value L&D teams can actually bring.

The example of TikTok is probably the most extreme when Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, decided to disband the talent team for precisely this reason, citing it had “limited practical value.” To be clear, employees attending a class or completing an online course that does not represent the actual context of their role and help to guide and support them to address pre-determined friction they are experiencing is highly unlikely to predictably and reliably provide what is needed to help employees to successfully transition.

How L&D Can Support Internal Mobility

The first thing L&D should do is find out where the biggest internal mobility challenges are in their organization. If L&D isn’t solving a problem that is being keenly experienced, then it can’t hope to achieve meaningful engagement, let alone make a meaningful impact. Many well-intended L&D professionals have designed and delivered a satisfactory course — or bought a smart platform filled with engaging content — that ends up making no demonstrable impact to the business.

In order to uncover and understand real problems relating to internal mobility, L&D professionals should explore:

• What departments and teams are currently hiring but are struggling to find the right talent, which means there is a risk to the operation?
• Where is there — or has there been historically — a heavy reliance on external hires?
• In which areas of the organization are employees leaving due to a lack of growth or development opportunities?
• In what areas of the organization are internal moves least successful, due to under-performance or skilled people leaving?

The answers to these questions can point L&D in the direction of real problems to solve. This is a far cry from simply rolling out courses that don’t target key business needs.

After identifying your organization’s internal mobility challenges and needs, the next step is to better understand them. Seek to understand the current situation and the desired situation to gain perspective on what skills and experience are absent for role, or why people have been less than successful during previous transitions.

It’s critical at this stage to not revert to a L&D “comfort zone” by considering how generic (or slightly tailored) content can be delivered. In other words, leaving it up to employees to do the hard part.

How an LMS Can Support Internal Mobility

To reiterate, the most important thing is knowing and understanding the real business problems being experienced. No amount of filtering of generic content suites can possibly do the work required to successfully support internal mobility.

If L&D understands the actual problems at hand, right down to specific situations, tasks and desired outputs, then smart learning technology can connect real problems to knowledgeable subject matter experts (SMEs) to provide swift and targeted guidance and support, based on what actually works for them.

By framing a need in the context of the role or task, SMEs can be asked to provide resources that detail what they know and do, in order to share their expertise with employees transitioning into new roles. This doesn’t need to be exhaustive at the first pass. Building a learning path iteratively can help ensure that what is being taught makes a difference, and offering further support builds upon this.

L&D’s measure of success is often determined by an improvement in the data sets used to recognize the business problem in the first place, and by the achievement of employee key performance indicators (KPIs) once an employee has moved into a new role in the organization.

The aim is not to have a perfect suite of bespoke content. The aim is to more successfully aid in the assimilation of transitioning employees and their KPIs being achieved through internal mobility over external job postings. Of course, it’s not entirely up to L&D to achieve this, but it’s a partnership with stakeholders and the transitioning employees themselves that should be only deemed successful when roles are filled and performance is at the required level to produce the required outputs.

This approach, of recognizing and addressing real business problems with the support of internal experts, will begin — and will continue — as a work in progress. It won’t seem as easy as launching a course or even a suite of courses, but L&D teams that are able to successfully support internal mobility will prove their value to the business during times of economic uncertainty.