'Every professional is looking for career growth and development'

There are a string of benefits that come from providing internal talent mobility opportunities within an organisation. For Tarishi Kwatra, transformation change management lead, PepsiCo Asia Pacific and HRBP Asia Pacific strategy & transformation, one of them is better succession planning.

“Internal talent mobility is extremely important from an organisation perspective because you’re trying to look at your own succession planning,” she told HRD Australia. “And you're ensuring that you're growing the right people at the right time and moving them around in the right way to get cross-country experiences, cross-cultural experiences as well as cross-functional experiences, if required.”

It also creates smoother transitions when job opportunities open up within a business, Kwatra added.

“Internal talent mobility becomes important for an organisation to ensure that you're building deeper ventures internally and you're not struggling [with] hiring external people when you may have people with the right skillset already,” she said. “It eases the time of movement, so if you have this plan in place, you can actually move people in critical roles without a gap.”

PepsiCo and talent mobility

Internal talent mobility for workers is something PepsiCo practices.

“We believe in providing the right critical experiences – which can be cross functional, which can be different leadership styles – to employees,” Kwatra said. “So that we ensure that we’re growing them at the right time for the right roles and are not really struggling for people to have the basic relevant experience when, say, their aspirational roles open up.”

Kwatra herself experienced internal mobility when working at PepsiCo.

“I was working with PepsiCo India for the past 11 plus years, and did a couple of multi-country roles based from India,” she said.

And when Kwatra made her own decision to move to Australia, she described how the company supported her.

“The company did support me at that point of time to try and see how best we can figure out a role for me,” she said. “Going to those lengths to actually create the right talent mobility for your right employees I think says a lot for an organisation.”

The benefits of internal mobility

Kwatra will be one of the speakers at this year’s HR Tech Summit in Sydney, on the panel about fostering internal talent mobility to increase retention and eliminate skills gaps.

She will discuss her experiences with internal mobility and how it can work as a tool for employee retention.

“Internal talent mobility as an employee retention tool also works best when people know what kind of career line of sight they have,” she said. “[And] they've had constant career conversations, and growth and development conversations to guide them in the right direction on what they really need to develop, whether it's internally or externally, and move them in the right goal.

“Internal talent mobility, especially as an organisation like PepsiCo, which is global in nature, you end up creating a lot of cross-cultural moves as well to ensure that we are providing the right career moves from a critically experience and capability building perspective. And different cultures are always welcomed in various parts of the world within PepsiCo.”

The benefits for employees

Providing workers the chance to move internally can support their career aspirations.

“Every professional is looking for career growth and development eventually,” Kwatra said. “You're looking to be placed with the right brand, with the right money and with the right learning opportunities.

“From an employee perspective, why organisations should be looking at internal talent mobility is [about] going back to what an employee really aspires for. It's important for an employee, at least a person who is aspirational, who really wants to learn and does not want to stay put… but believes in growing on the job. Those people will not really stick to an organisation which is not providing them the right skillset or the right growth or the right learning.”