SHL Study Finds 66% of US and UK Workers Believe They Must Leave to Advance

A survey of 2,036 employed adults in the United States and Britain has found that two thirds of workers believe they would have to leave their current employer to move up in their careers. The research, published by assessment company SHL in its Talent Mobility at Work in 2026: The Hidden Workforce report and reported on October 20, suggests that organizations trying to fill skills gaps may be overlooking capable people already on their payrolls.

The findings point to a mismatch between what employees are willing to do and what their employers can see. Most respondents said they were open to learning new capabilities rather than looking elsewhere, yet many described internal progression as difficult to reach.

Willingness to retrain runs high

According to the survey data, 83 percent of workers said they would retrain to secure a more senior role, and 82 percent said they would retrain to move into a different role. Almost nine in 10, or 89 percent, said they would undertake a formal skills assessment to show what they can do. The report's authors argue that the obstacle is often not a shortage of skills but a lack of visibility into where those skills sit inside an organization.

That gap appears most acute at the manager level. Only 42 percent of workers said their manager fully understands their skills beyond their current role. Among employees who feel their abilities are underused, one in five said their manager was not aware those capabilities existed at all.

The perception of unfairness is stronger in the US than in the UK: 59 percent of American workers and 49 percent of British workers said their employers favor external candidates over developing internal talent. SHL's data suggests this pattern pushes companies toward outside hiring for posts that could be filled through reskilling or redeployment.

Managers can block internal moves

Managers themselves can also stand in the way. Nearly a third of respondents, 31 percent, identified managers not wanting to lose good employees as a major obstacle to moving internally. The result, the report suggests, is a mismatch: organizations may be trying to hire capabilities from outside while employees with transferable skills stay in roles where their potential is not used.

The findings land as human resources leaders in several regions are under pressure to redesign jobs around artificial intelligence and to compete for scarce capabilities. Employers that treat talent acquisition as an external search exercise risk paying more for skills they already employ, while staff who cannot see a route upward are more likely to test the market.

The survey has limits: it covers two markets and captures perceptions, not employer records. Its value for HR teams lies in the comparison between what staff say they will do and what their organizations assume they will do. Businesses that map capabilities already held internally may find that some vacancies need reskilling rather than a recruitment budget.

What to watch next

The immediate question for employers is whether internal mobility becomes a measurable goal in performance reviews for managers, whose reluctance to release good staff is named in the research as a leading barrier. Workers, for their part, will be watching whether skills assessments translate into actual moves rather than exercises with no outcome. The report adds to a body of evidence that people teams are being asked to prove their workforce has the capabilities the business needs, rather than assuming that new hires are the only route to them.