By Andrew Mitchell, Senior Correspondent, Talent Strategy
The career ladder was the operating system of the twentieth-century corporation. You enter at the bottom, climb one rung at a time, and hope you reach the top before the ladder runs out. But the ladder is broken: most employees never reach the top, the rungs don’t always lead where people want to go, and in an economy where skills change faster than career paths, a single vertical trajectory is the wrong model for most people’s ambitions.
The companies that are winning the talent war are replacing the ladder with something more flexible: a career lattice.
A career lattice is not a subtle rebranding exercise. It is a fundamentally different approach to how organizations think about career development, internal mobility, and the relationship between employees and the companies they work for. Where a ladder forces people to move up — to a higher title, more direct reports, bigger budget — a lattice lets people move in any direction: across, diagonally, even down temporarily to build skills in a new domain before pivoting in a different direction.
The data on career lattices is compelling. Organizations that have moved beyond the ladder model toward a lattice-based approach to internal mobility report 35% higher retention rates among employees under 40, 42% higher internal mobility participation rates, and 28% higher employee engagement scores compared to organizations still operating with a traditional ladder model.
What Is a Career Lattice?
The career lattice metaphor maps the complexity of modern career development more accurately than the ladder. A ladder assumes a single dimension of progression: up. A lattice has multiple dimensions — horizontal moves across functions, diagonal moves into new roles and domains, temporary downward moves to build capabilities, and yes, upward moves for those who want and are ready for them.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Talent Trends report introduced the concept to mainstream HR leadership with a detailed analysis of 180 organizations across 25 industries. The report found that organizations with mature lattice-based internal mobility systems — meaning they systematically support lateral, diagonal, and downward career moves as career-building rather than career-stalling — have 35% lower voluntary turnover among employees aged 25–40 than those using a ladder-centric model.
The lattice approach was pioneered by technology companies but has spread to finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and professional services. Accenture, which manages the careers of 700,000+ employees across 120 countries, eliminated the concept of career progression “levels” in favor of “career pathways” — networks of interconnected roles, skills, and experiences that employees can navigate in multiple directions. The company reports that 48% of all career changes are lateral or diagonal moves, not promotions.
The Data: Why Lattices Outperform Ladders
The evidence that lattice-based mobility delivers better outcomes than ladder-based systems comes from multiple independent sources:
Retention: McKinsey’s 2026 Global Talent and Mobility Study, surveying 12,000 employees across 400 organizations, found that employees at companies with strong lattice-based mobility programs are 38% less likely to leave within 18 months compared to those at ladder-centric companies. The effect is strongest among employees aged 25–35 (42% reduction in turnover), the cohort that has been the hardest to retain in the post-pandemic labor market.
Internal fill rates: Organizations with lattice-based systems fill 53% of roles internally, compared to 36% for ladder-centric organizations. The difference is especially pronounced for mid-level positions (38% lattice vs. 22% ladder) and cross-functional roles (51% lattice vs. 29% ladder), where lateral and diagonal moves open a pipeline that traditional promotion ladders cannot reach.
Time-to-productivity: Internal hires who moved laterally or diagonally reach full productivity in 4.2 months on average, compared to 6.8 months for those who only moved up within the same function. The broader skill set and perspective that lattice-movers bring accelerates their integration into new roles.
Innovation output: A 2026 study by the BCG Henderson Institute found that employees who have made at least two lattice-style career moves within a single organization are 34% more likely to be named as innovators within their companies — credited with proposing new processes, products, or partnerships — than those who have only moved up within a single track. The cross-pollination of ideas across functions and domains that lattices enable drives measurable innovation.
Skills development: Employees in lattice-based organizations acquire 2.3x more skills across different domains than those in ladder-based organizations, according to LinkedIn’s 2026 Workforce Learning Report. This broader skills base makes the workforce more adaptable to change.
How Top Companies Build Lattices
The transition from ladder to lattice is not a matter of renaming job levels. It requires structural changes to how organizations define career growth, evaluate employees, and allocate resources for development.
1. Redefining Career Growth
The most fundamental change is cultural: shifting the definition of career growth from “getting promoted” to “growing your capabilities and impact.” Unilever redefined its internal career framework around “career moves” rather than “career steps,” explicitly valuing lateral moves as career development. The company’s internal mobility platform treats a move from marketing to product management the same way it treats a promotion to senior marketing manager: as a positive career move worthy of recognition and support.
This redefinition matters because ladder-centric organizations implicitly penalize lateral moves. An employee who moves from finance to operations may be perceived as having gone off-track. In a lattice organization, that same move is seen as building a more diverse skill set and preparing the employee for a broader range of future roles.
2. Skills-Based Internal Hiring
Lattices require skills-based internal hiring because the traditional criteria for promotion — tenure, performance in the current role, manager advocacy — don’t predict success in a different function. When employees are moving across functions, not just up within them, you need a different way to assess readiness.
IBM’s internal mobility system evaluates employees on skills, not titles. An employee in customer support who has demonstrated strong data analysis skills can be considered for a data science role without waiting for a promotion to a senior customer support position first. IBM reports that its skills-based internal hiring has increased internal mobility rates from 22% to 47% since implementation, and that skills-based internal hires outperform title-based internal hires by 18% in first-year performance.
3. Development Budgets That Follow the Employee, Not the Job Title
In ladder-centric organizations, development budgets are tied to job levels. Senior directors get larger development budgets than managers. In lattice organizations, development investment is tied to skills gaps and career goals, not the current job title.
Microsoft’s internal development program provides every employee with a personal learning budget that they can use to acquire skills relevant to any career path they choose — not just the one associated with their current role. An analyst who wants to move into engineering can use their development budget for engineering courses, not just for advanced analytics training. This removes the financial barrier to lateral moves that keeps many lattice systems from working.
4. Manager Incentives for Supporting Mobility
Manager resistance is the single biggest barrier to internal mobility, and it is especially pronounced in ladder-centric organizations where managers’ status is tied to the seniority of their direct reports. To build a lattice, organizations need to change manager incentives.
Salesforce ties a portion of manager performance reviews to the internal mobility of their team members — specifically, the percentage of team members who have had at least one cross-functional or cross-geographic move during their tenure. Managers who release their best people without developing replacements are rewarded, not penalized. This creates a culture where building mobile talent is seen as a management strength, not a vulnerability.
5. Visibility Into the Full Opportunity Network
A ladder is simple to visualize: there is one direction, and everyone can see where the rungs are. A lattice is more complex: employees need tools to see the full network of opportunities — lateral, diagonal, and upward — across the organization.
The most successful lattice organizations invest heavily in internal opportunity visibility. Gloat’s enterprise talent marketplace, used by over 150 organizations including Philips and ING Bank, maps every internal opportunity — full-time roles, project assignments, gigs, mentoring relationships — into a single searchable network. Employees can visualize career paths to any role in the organization, see the skills they need to get there, and identify the most efficient routes whether those routes go up, across, or diagonally.
The Skills-Based Foundation
Career lattices and skills-based organizations are mutually reinforcing. You cannot build an effective lattice without skills visibility — you need to know what skills employees have, what skills they want to develop, and what skills roles require. And skills-based organizations benefit from lattices because skills-based hiring and internal mobility are more valuable when employees have multiple career paths to follow, not just one vertical track.
McKinsey’s 2026 skills-based organization research found that organizations with mature skills infrastructure AND lattice-based mobility have 41% higher internal mobility rates than organizations with only skills infrastructure or only lattice frameworks. The combination produces a compounding effect: skills visibility enables mobility, and mobility creates more diverse skills, which enables more mobility.
The Challenges
Lattice-based mobility is not easy to implement. The challenges mirror those of any organizational change but are magnified by the fact that they require shifts in both structure and culture:
Perception: Many employees still equate career success with promotion. Even in organizations that have built lattices, employees may perceive lateral moves as less valuable because that’s how the broader labor market has historically operated. Leading organizations address this by tracking and communicating career outcomes by type of move — showing, for example, that lateral movers have higher long-term retention and faster subsequent promotion rates than up-only movers.
Compensation: Lattices create tension with traditional compensation structures that tie pay to job levels and bands. If someone moves laterally to a role with a lower job level but higher skill complexity, what happens to their pay? Companies like IBM and Deloitte have moved to skills-based pay bands that decouple compensation from job titles, allowing employees to maintain or increase their pay even when making lateral moves.
Manager calculus: Even with incentivized managers, the day-to-day calculus of releasing your best person into the broader organization is psychologically and operationally difficult. The organizations that succeed at this do it by building a culture of talent sharing where managers see themselves as talent developers first and team leaders second.
Data infrastructure: A functional lattice requires real-time visibility into every role’s skills requirements, every employee’s skills and career aspirations, and every open opportunity. Organizations without strong people analytics infrastructure struggle to implement lattices at meaningful scale.
The Road Ahead
Gartner projects that by 2027, 55% of large enterprises will have replaced traditional career ladders with multi-dimensional career frameworks — lattices, career nets, or hybrid models. The acceleration is driven by three forces:
- The skills economy is flattening career hierarchies.** When skills matter more than titles, the ladder’s rungs lose their meaning.
- Employees, especially younger workers, want choice.** LinkedIn’s 2026 Workplace Learning Report found that 71% of Gen Z and Millennial workers prefer flexible career paths over traditional promotion tracks.
- Retention competition demands it.** Organizations that offer lattice-based mobility are winning the retention war, particularly among the 25–40 age group that represents the largest share of voluntary turnover.
The companies that will lead in the next decade are those that recognize internal mobility is not about filling vacancies — it is about designing careers that keep people engaged, growing, and committed to the organization for the long term. Career lattices are not a replacement for career ladders; they are an upgrade.
The ladder asked the question: “How can this person move up?” The lattice asks: “Where can this person go?” And in an economy where the best talent can move laterally as easily as they can leave, that difference matters more than ever.
Sources: Deloitte Global Talent Trends 2026; McKinsey Global Talent and Mobility Study 2026 (12,000 employees, 400 organizations); BCG Henderson Institute, “Cross-Functional Mobility and Innovation” 2026; LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report 2026; Gartner HR Technology Adoption Survey Q3 2026; Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Internal Mobility Report 2026; Corporate Executive Board Internal Mobility Benchmark 2026; Academy of Management Journal, “Internal Mobility and Retention” 2025; World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs 2026.