What’s the first thing you would do if you started to feel a lack of fulfillment or challenge in your current role? You might begin investigating opportunities at other companies. Perhaps you’d start researching your current organization’s competitors, or the company your colleague left for last quarter, or change your LinkedIn status so recruiters know you’re willing to having a discussion.
Why do employers let their best talent get to the point where they enter the rabbit hole of potential opportunity, instead of finding a way to retain them?
Internal mobility, or the opportunity to move teams and roles within one organization, is still not as feasible an option as some may like it to be. In fact, according to a recent Gartner study, 61% of employees think it would be beneficial for their careers to work in different parts of the organization, and future career opportunity is consistently one of the top reasons employees leave an organization.
Tenured employees have already proven themselves, so you can assume they’re able to take on bigger projects and encourage greater collaboration between departments. Over the last few years, we as an organization acted on this conjecture, providing opportunities for our employees to develop new skills.
Jay Gordon is a MongoDB Developer Advocate and a major asset in providing information and assistance regarding all things MongoDB. He enables our developer community by creating technical content, answering questions, attending events, and providing as much assistance as possible to those using (or learning to use) MongoDB.
Jay was hired in 2016 as a Technical Account Manager on the Cloud Team to provide MongoDB customers with onboarding and integration assistance. While tackling his daily responsibilities, Jay became involved in helping the MongoDB user community understand new releases, products, and tools, acting as an advocate and evangelist. A little over a year into his role as a TAM, a Developer Advocate role opened up and Jay was the perfect fit.
“It was a difficult transition because I was taking on an entirely new role. There was some self-doubt that I was really capable of the position I had taken on, but in the end, much of that was just worry for the sake of worry. The MongoDB team was by my side to help with the shift, which had a lot to do with why I stayed instead of looking elsewhere for an opportunity, and the culture had a lot to do with my decision. Being part of MongoDB is a special experience and I was not ready to walk away from that quite yet. I love my job, I love the people I work with, and I love the opportunities to be part of something huge.”
Angshuman Bagchi joined the MongoDB team in 2013 as a Technical Service Engineer in Palo Alto. For over three years he worked on front line customer support helping customers become successful with MongoDB, but once he was struck with a desire to do something different, Angshuman went back to his development roots as a lead on our Technical Services Tools team, which is responsible for all tools used by our Technical Services Engineers. The role not only allowed him to do something different, it also provided the opportunity to learn managerial and administrative skills.
“My management was very supportive of my desire for a change. They gave me the freedom to explore opportunities both outside and within the broader Technical Services organization with the emphasis that I should be allowed to work on something I want. The move has afforded me a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth.”
Marie Vito is now the Program Lead and Coordinator for our award-winning Sales Enablement team – responsible for training, process implementation, tools, and coaching to make sales representatives and leaders the most productive they can be in their roles. Marie plans and leads the monthly MongoDB Sales Bootcamp training for all sales new hires, as well as anyone else in the company interested in learning about our sales strategy.
When she first joined MongoDB as a Recruiting Coordinator, Marie supported our sales organization by scheduling, coordinating, and facilitating interviews for all sales-related roles. During that time, she was able to form strong relationships with the sales team and quickly became interested in their goals and initiatives.
An initial conversation with the Senior Director of Sales Enablement helped to flesh out the role and determine that it was a position Marie wanted to pursue.
“Following that meeting I spoke with my then manager to express my aspirations. Once it was determined I was a good fit for the role, we developed a transition plan to ensure I would be leaving the recruiting team with a more than capable replacement, while still dedicating enough time to enablement training to make the ramp process as efficient as possible. It was incredible to have so much support from my new team, old team, and everyone else in the company.”
Providing employees the opportunity to try new things, explore new roles, and broaden their skills is a great way to foster both professional and personal growth. At MongoDB, we’ve found that supporting internal mobility is a key factor in retaining our best people and keeping them content.
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