Two-thirds of workers surveyed by SHL, a talent assessment and acquisition company, said they feel they will have to leave their current employer to advance their career despite wanting to stay — partly because managers may not understand their workers’ skills, per survey results released Thursday.
SHL surveyed over 2,000 employed adults across the U.S. and U.K. The majority of respondents said they would retrain to obtain a more senior role or even a different role altogether, and nearly 9 in 10 surveyed said they would “sit through a formal skills assessment” to show their employers what they were capable of.
That may be in part because only 42% of workers said their managers fully understood their skills beyond their current role, SHL said. Managers also may be reluctant to lose their skilled direct reports, workers said, which can create another barrier to internal mobility.
“The striking thing about this research is how willing people are to prove what they can do,” Lucy Beaumont, global senior vice president of product and design at SHL, said in a statement. “Employees are saying, ‘assess me, develop me, show me where I could go next’. Yet organizations continue to invest time and money searching the external market for individuals with skills and experience that they may already have.”
Notably, 59% of U.S. workers said their employer favors outside candidates over internal development.
The “build vs. buy” conundrum is an old one for the talent space — and can be influenced by the nature of companies themselves. A study released earlier this year by the University of South Florida found that companies with a deeper bench of older, skilled professionals were more likely to “build” talent internally thanks to a stable environment marked by a higher capacity for learning.
A shifting talent market may also force companies to re-evaluate their talent stacks. In a time of less turnover and less hiring, HR professionals are turning instead to internal mobility, a Careerminds report from last year indicated. But many companies may lack the systems to understand which skills their organizations have and need, a recent WTW study said — a key step in managing talent in a swiftly changing work environment.