With 43 million UK employees needing to be upskilled by 2030, and redundancies predicted to continue rising well into 2026, supporting individuals through change and transformation is top of the agenda for many HR leaders. A severely unpredictable climate has created an employment landscape that neither businesses nor people feel confident navigating. As such, best practices around career transition support must shift to meet changing needs and expectations.
Organisations that embrace these practices are best placed to build a workforce capable of successfully navigating change with confidence and resilience.
Deploying career support at the right time
Primarily deployed at the end of a change process, career transition support is often considered a remedial solution. And while providing support is always better than not, in waiting until redundancies take place, employers are inadvertently limiting the impact of said support and making for a more uncertain change process.
Instead, to drive positive change in a highly unpredictable world, organisations are going to want to take a more proactive approach to supporting their employees’ careers – making it readily available throughout employee tenures so that they can build the necessary skills and a mobility mindset ahead of time. When this happens, employees:
- Feel empowered to secure employment within six months of change taking place
- Are twice as likely to pursue internal mobility opportunities
- Say their career decision making improved and helped them grow
For organisations looking to stem the loss of talent and ensure their people are taken care of during transformation projects, integrating career support into their overarching talent management strategy makes complete business sense and will be essential to building change readiness.
Providing the right support in the right way
Providing access to support is one thing – ensuring it’s the right support is another. Not only has AI and new technology changed the way we work, but the way in which people view their careers has changed as well, with 45% of younger employees wanting to explore lateral moves to different industries and roles, instead of ‘climbing the ladder’.
Failing to provide support tailored to the needs of your workforce is what leads to 71% of employees saying their careers have stalled due to insufficient career support, and a similar percentage (74%) admitting that their productivity declined following an organisational restructure. After all, organisational change is never just about the practical implications of losing a job, there’s a significant emotional toll as well.
To help flip the narrative, organisations must take a human-centred approach to change – one that is anchored in empathetic leadership and professional coaching support to create an environment of psychological safety. And by combining this human-led approach with data and technology, only then can business leaders ensure their people benefit from best-in-class, hyper-personalised career support that drives meaningful career transitions.
The ever-evolving nature of today’s world of work is driving the need for increasing agility within organisations, which in turn is necessitating more regular change and transformation initiatives. In order to make a success of these projects throughout the next five years and beyond, organisations will need to be proactive and always put people first.
Find out more about the future of career transition by reading our latest report.
