More recently, Luke has made the leap from sales to partnerships. She is now pursuing a career path she’s more interested in which is exactly what a lateral move like this is for. It was a great move for her and the organisation as a whole. When a vacancy came up in that team, Crispina applied and blew the hiring team away. She had expressed interest in the People team early and set up shadowing and learning opportunities with them. And they’ve allowed for those people to pursue growth and progression in their own way.Ĭrispina, our now People Operations Manager started at Learnerbly as a Client Admin Associate. Two of the above scenarios recently occurred at Learnerbly. It can take you through a career path you’re more suited to and interested in. Or what about the person in Ops who always thought they’d like to get into the People function?Ī lateral move empowers you to scratch that itch. You might even know someone in Sales who wants to have a go at Partnerships. We’ve all probably observed a colleague’s work and thought, “wow, I’d love to try that!” Maybe you’re in Customer Service but have always wanted to try your hand at content writing. Lateral moves help people discover new careers If you have people who love diving in and giving things a go, they may find a lateral move suitable to their learning goals. When making a lateral move, an employee will need to learn new skills and come across new experiences. Lateral moves are a great way to foster continuous learning. Why Lateral Moves are Great for Your People Or you could look at the frameworks we suggest for making career progression everyone’s responsibility. So do check out our best advice on career development plans, what they are, why they are important, and how you develop them. This begs the question, how do we foster good career development and progression? It’s something we care about at Learnerbly, and happily enough, have already written about. This can mean moving to a different company, but generally speaking and specific to this article, lateral moves refer to internal shifts in the same company, often to a new team. To put it as plainly as possible, a lateral move is when an employee shifts their position to assume new responsibilities on the same career level. In this article, we’re looking at the benefits of lateral moves for your people’s career progression and growth. At Learnerbly, we believe that progression is going anywhere but backwards (and even backwards is sometimes okay ?).
In the traditional work model, you start at the bottom and ascend your way to the top in a pre-ordained series of steps.īut in today’s working world, we have the joy of choosing our own route to success and happiness in our work lives.
This tenuous metaphor introduces a key theme: there is more than one way to get to ‘the top’, whatever the top looks like for you. It might even provide you with new and delightful views you weren’t expecting. But the flatter track that goes around the back of the mountain still gets you there. What’s the best way to climb a mountain? The boldest of us would prefer to attack it at its steepest point.