How MYOB improved internal mobility, upskilled their workforce and empowered employees to own their own career

MYOB is going through a SaaS transformation making it even harder to find niche and in-demand tech skills.

Their solution? Re-assess their internal mobility strategy to focus on upskilling our workforce and ensuring team members have the tools and resources to own their own career.

Before we hear from MYOB Talent Leads Ash Lyas & Adam Avci at the upcoming ATC2023, we sat down with them to get an idea of what changes they made that resulted in a 48% internal hire rate this year so far.

Why do companies need to think differently about how they approach internal mobility? 

There has been a skills shortage in the labour markets for some time now, we’ve started to see the effects of this before Covid and it’s making it harder and harder to find candidates with the right skills and the right values for our business.

MYOB is going through a SaaS transformation making it even harder to find niche and in-demand technology skills in particular. We were able to focus the efforts of the Talent team not only on having great external candidate conversations, but also great internal Career Conversations, with a strong focus on internal mobility, upskilling our workforce and ensuring team members have the tools and resources to own their own career. We were able to create an environment for 1:1 conversations designed to complement the employee’s quarterly reviews with their Manager, to discuss career aspirations with someone who lives and breathes recruitment every day.

The knock-on effects of this are retaining IP, longevity of tenure, workforce planning, employee engagement and developing active talent pools of our staff.

It’s common to face internal barriers to internal mobility initiatives – leaders worry that they’ll lose their entire team elsewhere! How did you gain senior leadership and exec buy-in for your initiatives?

Our Talent Advisory model allows us access to the business, and gain understanding of what they are going through, where their pain points are and our strategic workforce plan.

Working with our Head of Talent and People Experience, we were able to talk to senior leadership about:

• the issues they are facing in a skills short labour market,
• how the benefit of having a strong internal mobility program will help with employee engagement, retention and business continuity,
• and future proofing those employees to make sure they have the skills to take MYOB forwards.

There was also a conversation that needed to happen to make sure that we aren’t holding our employees back and that we needed to change our thinking on internal mobility. We needed to leverage the great employees we have, think more about horizontal movement and how that is also a promotion and beneficial to both parties, and set everyone up for success.

What kinds of success stories have you seen play out at MYOB since you’ve rolled out your new approach to internal mobility?

One of the first things we have noticed has been the visibility of people we’ve engaged with and the strength of the internal talent we have at MYOB that would be hard to find externally. We’ve also had lightbulb moments where we’ve explained that internal moves can be horizontal as well as vertical and sometimes that horizontal move is actually the right one for the individual and the company. We have also been able to identify succession options for certain teams and have been able to move an employee into another role, within weeks of having a Career Conversation with them.

These conversations are also feeding into our Strategic Workforce Plan, enabling us to understand the gaps in skills or where we would need an uplift in skills as we navigate our SaaS journey. We won’t be able to see the impact on our engagement scores until a little later in the year but we are confident that the feedback we’ve received should result in positive results. And at this point in 2023, 48% of hires so far this year have been internal.

Want to know more? Join us at ATC2023 at Sydney’s Luna Park on 22nd & 23rd November to hear Adam and Ash’s presentation MYOB’s fresh perspective on Talent Pooling, Internal Mobility & Demand Planning.