Careers & Skills
Fewer workers are moving into new roles inside their own companies, according to a report Workday released October 5. The report draws on workforce data from employers that use Workday’s HR software.
“Internal moves fell at 57% of employers year over year, and promotion rates worldwide stayed essentially flat,” Workday said. The 57% figure is the share of employers where internal moves declined, not the size of the decline.
Nearly 4 in 10 employees surveyed said their company had gone through a reorganization or restructuring in the past year.
What is blocking internal moves
Employees who tried to move internally most often cited hiring being paused for the role, managers who did not support the move and selection processes that did not feel fair, according to Workday’s survey. About half of employees did not try to move internally last year. Of those, 27% said they did not see an attractive opportunity inside their company.
Workday also reported that voluntary turnover runs at roughly 16% a year and that about 70% of employees are still with the same company two years later.
“Employees may not be changing jobs, but their jobs are changing around them,” said Phil Willburn, Workday’s vice president of people systems, intelligence and support.
AI expectations and skills demand
In the survey, 40% of business leaders said they expect AI to help them get more out of the employees they already have, while 28% said they expect it to reduce headcount. Those figures describe expectations, not workforce changes that have happened.
In job-requisition data from roughly 550 employers using Workday Recruiting, demand for basic AI skills such as simple prompting peaked in January 2026 and then fell 25%. Demand for hands-on skills such as building AI tools, automating workflows and AI engineering rose 51% between September 2025 and July 2026. Over the same period, mentions of management and leadership skills fell 7% and training skills fell 13%.
The report also found a gap in employer support: 79% of workers said they know what skills they need, but only 66% said their employer helps them develop those skills.
A crowded external market
Workday said the median number of applicants for each filled job rose to 69 from 58 a year earlier, while the time to fill a role held at about 60 days. In a separate August survey, 84% of job seekers said they used AI during their search.
How to read the numbers
This is vendor research. The mobility, promotion and turnover figures come from de-identified data at Workday customers with at least 250 employees, matched year over year. The leader and employee figures come from a global survey of about 6,000 employees and business leaders. The report gives global results. It does not provide separate figures for the United States, Georgia or metro Atlanta.
What to watch: whether government data on job-to-job moves and quits show the same slowdown in mobility that Workday sees inside companies.
Sources
- Workday, “Workday Global Workforce Report: AI Is Rewriting Jobs More Than It’s Cutting Them,” October 5, 2026. https://newsroom.workday.com/2026-10-05-Workday-Global-Workforce-Report-AI-Is-Rewriting-Jobs-More-Than-Its-Cutting-Them
- Workday blog, five takeaways from the Global Workforce Report, October 5, 2026. https://blog.workday.com/en-us/5-takeaways-leaders-can-act-on-now.html
- Phil Willburn, Workday Perspectives, “Staying Put Is the New Moving Forward,” October 5, 2026. https://www.workday.com/en-us/perspectives/hr/staying-put-new-moving-forward.html
Featured photo: A Workday office building in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2018. Representative image of the company; the report draws on data from employers that use Workday software, not this office. Photo: Ben P L, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0). Cropped from the original.
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