If you look at the careers of most successful business leaders, they often began with someone offering them an opportunity that helped set them on a trajectory for organizational impact. Whether it’s a manager who sees great potential in a promising direct report or a hiring manager who makes a bet on an ambitious upstart, these rare moments set an employee on a more fulfilling and impactful course and unlock immense value for their businesses.
I have personally been the beneficiary of many incredible opportunities, and without them, I’m not sure I’d be writing this article today. In fact, there has been a chain reaction of them. A Boys and Girls Club director wrote me a letter of recommendation that turned into a full scholarship to Boston College that turned into a career in higher education, which led to a consulting relationship with a company that would be acquired by Monster.com, which launched my career in human capital … and on and on. You get the point.
But I would also point out that many of these developments were happenstance, a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And while this may be a common blueprint for many impactful careers, it’s also clear that organizations can no longer depend on informal sponsorship or employees’ personal ambitions to produce the workforce they need.
That legacy workforce development and management approach really only works when workforce needs evolve gradually. And in the era of AI, business priorities and skill requirements are rapidly outpacing the gradual evolution of our workforce needs. In my conversations with CHROs, I am already hearing how cracks in this system are being exposed through talent scarcity for key roles, rising talent acquisition costs, and delayed workforce agility.
In this article, I break down a few key barriers to workforce mobility that we’ve identified in our newest research and explain how they block the workforce agility that CHROs must create to thrive in this era of HR leadership.
Barrier 1: Employees Can’t See Where Their Skills Could Create More Value
Most employees want opportunities that enable them to grow, contribute, and take on new challenges. Yet many spend years developing skills and experiences that remain largely invisible outside their immediate team. They know they have more to offer, but they often have little visibility into where those capabilities might be valuable elsewhere in the organization.
This is literally what happened to me, and it had such a profound impact on my career that I am writing about it in my next book. I was working in undergraduate admissions at my alma mater, Boston College, a place that felt more like home than a university. A few years into the role, I knew I wasn’t growing professionally. But for a long time, I had no clear sense of what came next or how the skills I had acquired would translate into bigger career opportunities.
Making employee skills more visible across the organization
Over time, employees in these situations begin to feel that their career options are limited to the opportunities their manager can provide or the roles they happen to encounter through personal connections. Meanwhile, teams across the organization are searching for capabilities that may already exist internally but remain difficult to identify.
Barrier 2: Employees’ Mobility Is Discouraged by Personal and Professional Risk
Many employees are willing to pursue new opportunities, but they are often forced to weigh that ambition against the risks that come with movement. Exploring a role on another team, participating in a stretch assignment, or expressing interest in a different career path can feel like a gamble. Employees may worry that their commitment will be questioned or if an unsuccessful move could damage future opportunities. As a result, many employees choose stability over exploration.
Managers face a similar tension: They want to support career growth, but they are also responsible for delivering results and retaining high-performing talent.
Stability is holding back value
The underlying issue is that many talent systems were designed to optimize for stability rather than agility. Rules, approval processes, performance measures, and informal expectations were created to support workforce continuity and predictable execution. What emerges is a pattern in which both employees and managers become cautious about movement, even when mobility would benefit the organization.
Barrier 3: Employees Don’t Have Pathways to Build the Skills They Need to Succeed in New Roles
Even when employees identify opportunities they are excited about, they are not always sure how to acquire the skills needed to get there. The desire to grow exists, yet the path to building new capabilities often feels disconnected from the realities of day-to-day work. As a result, employees often find themselves relying on development systems that struggle to keep pace with the speed of change. By the time formal learning programs are developed and deployed, workforce needs may have already shifted.
Building skills for a rapidly changing workforce
This challenge is largely structural; traditional learning models were designed for an environment in which skill requirements evolved gradually and organizations had time to respond. Today’s environment is very different. New technologies and business priorities are emerging at a much faster rate than many development systems were built to accommodate. And without the capacity for continuous learning, mobility becomes harder to sustain and agility becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.
Bottom Line: Talent Mobility Plays an Essential Role in Workforce Agility and Organizational Resilience to Disruption
When most organizations think about talent mobility, they tend to view it as a development strategy or an employee retention tool. Those outcomes certainly matter, but they are no longer the primary reason mobility deserves leadership attention. Today, the real value of mobility is that it creates stronger workforce agility, giving organizations the capacity to move talent and skills quickly as priorities shift.
Workforce agility is the future of talent strategy
As AI continues to reshape work faster than organizations can redesign roles or hire new talent, workforce fluidity is becoming a defining source of competitive advantage. The organizations that adapt most successfully will build systems that allow those skills to move quickly across the enterprise, removing barriers that prevent employees from contributing where they are needed most.
For CHROs, that means rethinking mobility not as a stand-alone talent initiative but as a core capability for organizational resilience.
If you are interested in learning more about our newest signals on talent mobility and the overall mission to build stronger workforce agility, I encourage you to join us at our upcoming Future-Ready CHRO Experience. We will be sharing our latest signals on workforce agility and the workforce transitions that must be implemented in response to AI disruption.
Join us in NYC for an opportunity to grow, connect with peers, and formulate your strategy for building a workforce that can adapt as quickly as the business demands.
