Internal Moves Fell at 57% of Employers. Where Do Stuck Workers Go Next?

Internal moves fell at 57% of employers over the past year, and promotion rates worldwide barely moved. That is the core finding of Workday's 2026 Global Workforce Report, published October 5. Most people stayed in their seats. The work in those seats changed anyway.

The report draws on a September survey of 6,000 full-time employees and about 1,780 business decision-makers, an August pulse survey of 5,944 workers, matched HR data from companies with 250 or more employees, and job-requisition data from roughly 550 enterprise employers. Read together, the numbers describe a workforce standing still on a floor that keeps shifting.

Voluntary turnover runs at about 16% a year. Roughly 70% of employees are still with the same company 2 years later. Nearly 4 in 10 say their company went through a reorganization or restructuring in the past year. Phil Willburn, Workday's Vice President of People Systems, Intelligence & Support, summed it up in one line:

"Employees may not be changing jobs, but their jobs are changing around them."

The ladder up has stopped moving

For most of my career, a promotion or an internal transfer was how people relearned on the company's time. You took the new seat, you picked up the new skills, and the company absorbed the learning curve because it needed you in it. That is the system I worked inside for 20 years at Cisco, where I shaped a $1.1 billion innovation portfolio. When internal moves fall at 57% of employers and promotions flatten, that path narrows for everyone.

About half of employees did not try to move internally last year. Of those, 27% said they saw no attractive internal opportunity. Leaders are planning to ask more of those same people. In the survey, 40% of business leaders expect AI to help them get more from existing employees, while 28% expect it to reduce headcount. More output from the same seats, with fewer new seats to move into.

The door out is more crowded

When the ladder stalls, the natural move is to look outside. Workday's data makes that a harder bet than it used to be. The median number of applicants per filled job rose to 69, up from 58 a year earlier. Applicants per filled job rose 40% in technology and media and 27% in financial services.

Job seekers have picked up the tools too: 84% used AI in their search. Time to fill a role held steady at about 60 days, so employers are spending the same amount of time choosing from a much bigger pool.

The skills underneath are moving fastest

Here is where the squeeze tightens. Demand for basic AI skills in job requisitions, the simple prompting most corporate courses teach, peaked in January 2026 and then fell 25%. Over the same window, demand for hands-on AI skills rose 51%. That category covers building AI tools and automating workflows, up to full AI engineering. A skill employers wanted everyone to learn in January was being asked for a quarter less often within months.

Two smaller numbers deserve attention. Mentions of management and leadership skills in job requisitions fell 7%, and mentions of training skills fell 13%. Employers are writing the ability to teach others into fewer job requisitions, at the same moment the skills list is turning over fastest.

Source: Workday 2026 Global Workforce Report. Skills-demand figures cover job requisitions from about 550 enterprise employers, September 2025 to July 2026.

Standing still has become a career risk

In the book I am writing now, The Great Relearning, I call this position too old to retrain, too young to retire. The Workday numbers show what holds a person in that position. The ladder inside the company has frozen and the market outside is more crowded, while the skills employers want change on a timescale of months.

The people caught in it are ready to learn: 65% of workers say they are confident they can learn new skills if asked, and 79% say they know which skills they need. Only 66% say their employer helps them build those skills. The heaviest AI users feel both sides at once: 62% of them think AI will make their current skills less valuable, and 76% of the same people expect AI to open new career opportunities.

Watch any mid-career employee caught in this position, someone who has already taught themselves the AI tools on their own time. They applied for the internal move and did not get it, then looked at an outside posting and saw how many people were applying. Their question is short: what should I learn next, and who will let me use it?

Employees planning to stay are less likely to recommend their employer than those planning to leave, by as much as 11 points in the public sector. That is what retention looks like when the ladder freezes. People stay, and their belief in the place drains out slowly.

The same question follows me into my advisory work with the California State University system on AI governance. If the skills list changes twice in a year, the institutions that train people and the companies that employ them need a shared answer for where that learning gets used. A course with no seat waiting at the end of it is half a plan.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 11 million Americans McKinsey expects will need to change occupations. The Workday report shows the earlier stage of that story, inside companies, among people who never left. I track this pattern across the future of work, and the remedy keeps coming back to the same place: an internal move is the cheapest retraining program a company owns.

So here is the question I am taking into my own meetings this month. Which of our people could move into a hands-on AI role inside this company in the next 6 months, and what is stopping us from letting them try? If you do not set the budget, the question still belongs to you. Ask your manager which internal role uses the skill you are learning now, and what it would take for you to try it. And if you see this differently, I'm easy to find.

Here is what makes Alex a credible voice on this topic: Alex Goryachev shaped Cisco's $1.1 billion innovation portfolio over 20 years and now advises the California State University system on AI governance, so he has watched both sides of this problem: the internal moves that used to retrain people on the job, and the institutions now trying to keep pace with how fast the required skills change.

Bring Alex in to help your leadership team open the ladder back up →