ManpowerGroup’s global career and talent development arm has come out strongly in favour of increasing ‘career mobility’ following the publication of its study, which found that 20% of employees are stuck in the wrong role, doing work they are neither motivated by, engaged with or productive in.
The study, by Manpower’s Right Management is based on interviews with more than 4,600 people across 20 countries, and concluded that companies need to invest in helping people develop their skills and gain valuable experience so that they can transfer to roles that they are more suited to.
Right now, career shifting can be tough. The demands of hiring managers or headhunters often centre around the desire for a linear career path (account executive to account manager and then account director) often in very similar business types. It’s understandable why this has been favoured up until now: there was a perceived risk on behalf of some companies of hiring someone who has not done exactly the same role before, for both company and employee.
Fast forward to today; our industries are changing fast. In the creative and media worlds in particular, technologies such as AI and blockchain promise to change the way we work, whether that’s through automating repetitive tasks, or through smart contracts and transparent trading to clean up the media supply chain. Today’s working world actually demands career mobility; today’s marketing manager could easily become tomorrow’s data scientist; a web developer in a media agency may soon need to learn about blockchain.
This will likely necessitate an increase in what Amazing If calls ‘squiggly career paths’ – those that are messy, non-linear; demonstrative of a hunger to learn more and immerse oneself into different disciplines every few years. To facilitate this, hiring managers and recruitment consultants will need to start asking new questions; instead of getting people to prove proficiency in exactly the same prior role, they will need to focus on core competencies and potential instead. This involves shaking off the risk-averse thinking that permeates the hiring process, and thinking in a visionary way: we move from asking “how can we prove this person is right for the role” to “how does this person want to fulfill their potential and contribute to the business they are joining?”
The report authors talk of the need to adopting “high-tech, high-touch” approaches, involving a blend of coaching and innovative edu-tech platforms. It would arguably also necessitate talent mapping of all new employees to enter a business; those that are smaller and are yet to have a culture set in stone may have a head start on this; but larger businesses can take advantage of key moments of change (massive growth, company moves, leadership changes, acquisitions) to affect these massive cultural shifts as well. The benefits of doing so could be considerable – not only would it help match people to the right positions, but the Right Management report suggests businesses could benefit from a 40% increase in engagement with a knock-on-effect on productivity and performance.