But first, what exactly is career mobility? Essentially, it’s how easily employees can move into different roles within a company. That could mean upwards with a promotion, sideways with lateral transfers into a new role, or even cross-functional moves across teams, business units, or projects.
For many organisations, career mobility still sits in the nice-to-have category — something encouraged when business conditions allow for it. According to Charles Disneur, Head of Sales & Marketing at Adecco, this mindset is increasingly risky.
“Career mobility should be treated as a core business strategy, not a reward,” Charles says. “It directly shapes how organisations close skill gaps, retain key talent, and stay competitive in a fast-changing labour market.”
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Research from Adecco Group reinforces this shift: 76% of workers believe that employers should prioritise placing internal talent into open roles before hiring externally. “When organisations treat mobility as optional, they risk losing their workforce altogether,” Charles adds.
What employees are really asking for
Employers, pay attention. Charles notes that many employees are not looking to leave — they’re looking to grow. “People want progression, reskilling, and purposeful career conversations with their current employer,” he explains. “When those conversations don’t happen, employees are more likely to look externally.”
For employers, the implications are significant. A lack of clarity around skills and pathways can weaken workforce planning and make transformation efforts difficult, particularly in markets like Singapore where skilled talent is scarce.
In practice, this means employees are seeking visibility into internal opportunities, a clearer understanding of transferable skills, and realistic pathways from their current roles into future ones.
This emphasis on transferable skills is echoed in SkillsFuture’s latest Jobs-Skills Insights report, which highlights that while every job has a unique skills profile, many skills can be applied across roles. Understanding how skills transfer and where demand is growing can help individuals make better decisions around reskilling, role transitions, and long-term career planning.
Why mobility is easier said than done
Yes, organisations may publicly support internal mobility. However, in practice, far fewer succeed at it consistently. “Most companies still rely on manual reviews, informal networks, and ad-hoc redeployment,” Charles observes.
“That approach simply doesn’t scale in a labour market like Singapore’s, where demand for skilled talent outstrips supply, and hiring cycles are unforgivingly fast.”
To build a truly supportive ecosystem for internal movement, Charles recommends organisations to rethink both their architecture and operating culture of mobility.
What mobility actually requires
According to Adecco, companies that enable mobility effectively focus on four foundational elements:
1) A shared language for skills
The foundation is a clear skills taxonomy: a way to describe roles, competencies, and levels in a consistent and transparent manner. Without this, employees can’t meaningfully compare opportunities, and hiring managers can’t evaluate internal candidates fairly.
Skills must also be portable — captured from projects, performance, and training, so they travel with the employee as they move across teams.
2) Data-driven visibility of talent
Skills evolve continuously, and forward-looking mobility systems need to reflect that dynamism. That means drawing from many more datapoints, such as role histories, learning records, project contributions, assessment signals — even emerging skills inferred from real work.
To do this and do it well, companies will need the ability to synthesise billions of data signals into a single, accurate picture of an employee’s capabilities and potential. This is where skills intelligence technologies, automation, and AI matter, integrated into a company’s core infrastructure.
3) A genuine internal talent marketplace
A good mobility ecosystem must make moving easy. Employees should be able to browse short-term gigs, rotations, and full-time roles with the same ease as when navigating external job boards. They should receive role recommendations aligned to their skills and career intent, not just suggestions based on keyword matches.
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To do that, companies must design user experiences that encourage exploration, surface stretch opportunities, and remove friction — from simplified applications to transparent timelines. When done right, employees will stop treating internal mobility as a gamble, and start seeing it as a natural part of their career progression.
4) Leadership signals that encourage and support movement
While technology enables mobility, it is a company’s culture that truly sustains it. Managers need to be incentivised to let talent move, not hoard it. Career conversations should be normalised long before an opportunity arises. And leadership should signal how cross-functional movements are seen as an investment (not a disruption) to operational continuity.
Helping employees make better career moves
For employers, the goal is not free movement, but guided movement, where employees can see viable options and understand what it takes to move into them. In practice, this means:
- Normalising career conversations throughout an employee’s lifecycle, not only during performance reviews or exit discussions. This includes offering career coaching, mobility guidance, or digital tools for career reinvention.
- Providing access to upskilling and reskilling opportunities for employees to gain new skills that align directly with business priorities and future roles. For example, leveraging Workforce Singapore’s Career Conversion Programmes (CCP), so employees can reskill and transition into growth job roles.
- Offering mentorship and reflective practice, where employees are paired with mentors to reflect and build on their technical competence and emotional readiness for career pivots.
- Making skills visible and trusted, so employees can confidently signal what they are capable of beyond their job titles or tenure.
- Leveraging career visioning tools, such as the Skills and Job Mobility Dashboard, to help employees understand market conditions, identify feasible career pathways, and consider the skills needed for such transitions. “We encourage employers to treat tools like this as a career compass,” Charles adds. “They show how skills move across roles in the market, which helps translate external patterns into realistic internal options for employees.”
Let them move, or lose them!
Career mobility should no longer be just an HR initiative, but a strategic workforce capability. It’s about building systems that allow companies to move talent deliberately and with less risk.
In a labour market with skill shortages and constant change, relying solely on external hiring is no longer sustainable. Organisations that adapt the fastest are those that know what skills their employees already have and can redeploy them with confidence.
“The entire workforce is a reservoir of untapped capability,” Charles concludes. “That capability only becomes visible — and valuable — when firms build the systems to surface it.”
