Vertical Mobility: A Lever for Your Company

The human capital of a company or organization is decisive in its ability to adapt to transformations and challenges in its industry. Transition management, or vertical mobility, is a performance lever to integrate into your HR strategy. Why and how should vertical mobility be leveraged in your HR management policy to facilitate internal changes?

Within a company or group, career developments of collaborators can follow different paths. Internal professional mobility, or crossboarding, presents several facets: horizontal mobility, transversal mobility, geographic mobility, and vertical mobility.

Transition management, vertical mobility brings a collaborator already employed in the company to evolve toward a hierarchically superior or inferior position. With this internal recruitment, the career advancement of the collaborator concerned can therefore be ascending, with a promotion for example, or descending, with a demotion. This requires careful change management to maintain employee motivation.

Access to the new position always occurs within the same department, at a different level of the hierarchy. Unlike what happens with a horizontal mobility opportunity, the collaborator does not change departments or profession. Their job description, their level of responsibility, their social status fluctuate. This can present challenges for the organization in terms of management and personnel management.

Vertical mobility can be complementary to geographic mobility when the workplace is located at another site.

All socioprofessional categories, all professions can be affected by this type of mobility, which is also intergenerational. It allows responding to varied socio-economic needs, by offering career opportunities to individuals from all backgrounds

Vertical mobility also includes cases of more drastic career changes, such as when an executive decides to start their own business. In this scenario, there is a significant change in status and responsibilities, thus marking a transition to a new socioprofessional category.