4 in 10 employees say changing jobs is easier than promotions: Study

Four in 10 employees say it's easier to land a new job elsewhere than to move into a new role at their current company. That finding, from TalentLMS's 2026 Skills Visibility Report, suggests the workplace "talent shortage" many companies describe may actually be a visibility problem.

The report, based on a survey of 1,500 US employees and managers, found 90% of managers believe they understand their team's skills, compared with just 69% of employees who agree.

A similar disconnect can be observed regarding development, with 90% of managers claiming to support their team’s training but just 60% of employees feeling supported. According to Dimitris Tsingos, the CEO of Epignosis and the parent company of TalentLMS, the problem lies in the gap between these figures rather than a shortage of competent staff.

Almost two-thirds of the surveyed employees, 56%, claim that the lack of recognition of their skills led to the stagnation of their career growth. Additionally, 42% of those surveyed said that managers only paid attention to skills gaps when there were problems with performance.

Nearly a third, 31%, would leave the company in order to have an opportunity to develop further, and according to the report, that is a reasonable reaction to being invisible, not dissatisfaction with the position itself.

Exactly half of the respondents claim that their company frequently hires people from outside the company for skills that exist within the company itself. This is consistent with another study by Gartner, quoted in the same report, according to which just 8% of companies have accurate information regarding the skills possessed by their existing workforce.

Although 88% of companies told LinkedIn in its Workplace Learning Report of 2025 that they are worried about employee retention, very few of them seem to keep track of the skills which will enable them to do something about it – just 18% of them have a platform to monitor such skills.

Almost half of the respondents, 47%, claim that regular assessment of skills will increase visibility.