After years of tightening labour markets and rising hiring costs, more organisations are hoping to solve skills and resourcing issues by looking inward, asking whether the capability they need already exists (but laying dormant) within the business.
Internal mobility, the ability to redeploy, develop and retain talent through clear career pathways, has moved from an HR aspiration to a strategic priority. The logic is sound. The execution, according to new research, is falling short.
New research across Australia and New Zealand finds that while organisations report confidence in their ability to fill roles internally, employees experience something quite different.
Career pathways are unclear, mobility feels limited, and the cohort of employees most responsible for delivering strategy, Gen X, reports the lowest capability scores across every area measured. The cost of this disconnect is accumulating through regrettable attrition, slower hiring, weaker leadership pipelines and stalled workforce redeployment.
The findings come from The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability, a new report published by workforce-readiness solutions provider Cornerstone OnDemand.
The report, built around Cornerstone’s Culture and Capability Index, draws on surveys of 452 HR leaders and 780 employees across organisations with 500 or more staff, assessing workforce capability across six areas: skills visibility, learning, career mobility, culture and trust, leadership, and AI and workforce planning. Mobility and career pathways ranks among the lowest-scoring areas in the region.
This article features excerpts from the report, focusing on the internal mobility gap across ANZ and the generational capability risk compounding it.
The mobility and career pathways disconnect across ANZ
Mobility and career pathways allow organisations to move talent efficiently across roles and functions. This supports internal redeployment and helps retain employees by providing clear career progression opportunities. While its impact is more targeted, mobility plays an important role in reducing regrettable attrition and improving internal hiring outcomes.
In Australia, younger employees report significantly higher expectations around career growth, with 67% saying they see clear career opportunities within their organisation, compared with 36% of older employees.
At the same time, 65% of Gen Z employees say they would consider leaving their organisation for better career or development opportunities, compared with 42% of older generations.
These are not only employee experience signals. They point to workforce conditions that can affect retention, productivity, hiring efficiency and workforce stability.
Skills Visibility allows organisations to understand and deploy talent effectively. This improves internal mobility and reduces reliance on external hiring. This translates into improved time-to-fill and cost efficiency, strengthening overall workforce agility.
The data points to a structural problem. Organisations believe the internal talent supply exists. Employees, particularly those in mid-career and senior roles, do not believe the pathways to access it are there.
That gap increases regrettable attrition, slows hiring, weakens leadership pipelines and limits the organisation’s ability to redeploy talent where it is most needed.
The generation carrying the load, without the support
Workforce capability is not experienced uniformly across generations. Gen X emerges as the most critical and most at-risk cohort. Despite occupying the majority of management roles, they report the lowest scores across all six capability areas, including leadership, mobility, and AI readiness.
This creates a structural risk: the group responsible for executing strategy is also the least supported by current capability systems.
Among Gen X employees in Australia, nearly one in five, 19%, do not believe their organisation is helping them build the skills needed for the future, compared with 9% of Gen Z and Millennials.
One likely explanation lies in the role Gen X plays within organisations. As the primary cohort occupying middle and senior management roles, they are responsible for translating strategy into execution, managing teams, and navigating organisational change. As a result, they are often the most exposed to capability gaps, particularly in areas such as leadership, workforce planning, and internal mobility.
At the same time, capability-building initiatives may be disproportionately focused on early-career talent, leaving more experienced cohorts comparatively underserved. This creates a disconnect where Gen X employees are expected to lead transformation but may not feel equally supported by the systems and capabilities required to do so effectively.
The implications are significant. As the cohort responsible for executing strategy and shaping day-to-day workforce experience, gaps in Gen X capability can have a disproportionate impact on organisational performance.
Organisations that take a more targeted approach to capability building are better positioned to allocate investment where it drives the greatest economic return, address the most critical gaps, and accelerate impact across workforce outcomes.
In particular, gaps across key workforce segments, including mid-career talent and leadership layers, represent high-leverage opportunities for capability investment.
Internal mobility and mid-career capability are two sides of the same problem. When pathways are unclear and the people expected to lead execution feel unsupported, the cost shows up across attrition, hiring speed and leadership pipeline strength.
The full findings of the report, including pillar-by-pillar scores, generational breakdowns, and recommended steps for strengthening internal mobility and mid-career capability, are available in The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability.
Organisations can also benchmark their own capability score and estimate their economic opportunity using the Culture and Capability Index Calculator.
About Cornerstone
At Cornerstone, we believe in AI that works in the service of people, amplifying their judgment to drive high-performing, future-ready organizations forward. Cornerstone Workforce AI™, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, brings together workforce and labor market data into a proprietary Cornerstone People Graph™, translating signals into intelligence, targeting learning where it matters, developing critical skills, and surfacing hidden talent. Delivered as an open, enterprise platform across whatever application your people work in every day, Cornerstone Workforce AI is built for scale, security, and trust, with certified AI guardrails. As an industry leader, Cornerstone is helping approximately 7,000 organizations, 140M+ users, across 186 countries build continuous workforce readiness.
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