The internal transfer is the most underrated career move

Leaving your company forfeits the trust, relationships, and institutional knowledge you spent years building. A transfer redeploys it. Here's how to make one without getting labeled a flight risk.

There are a lot of career strategies out there for working mothers — and I believe in two strategies that are seemingly at odds with each other.

1. You need to leave your company to make serious gains in your compensation and experience as a leader.

2. Changing roles in your company is one of the most underrated career moves a leader can make to grow their expertise.

Today, I want to focus on the second one — but first, I need to go back to the early days of my career to set the stage. For most of my career, I focused on the first strategy and it worked out quite well for me. In the early days of my career I was quite underpaid. And, in one move, I nearly doubled my salary. Another move put me solidly in the six figures bracket and just a few more got me in a range I never thought possible for myself. I’m a huge believer that moving outside of your company will prove to be incredible for your career, especially within the area of compensation. It definitely worked for me.

One of my greatest fears when I became a mother was not knowing how this colossal life change would rock my world. Sure, I’d been a nanny for years and understood the immense work that went into caring for children. I knew of other working mothers — my own mother had an impressive career of her own that I had modeled for me as a young girl. But for me, I worried that I would lose my edge, fall flat in my drive to succeed, and slowly slip into a malaise about how much I lost myself in motherhood. Sounds quite dramatic but I’m not sure I’ve ever voiced it so bluntly before. As I prepared to bring my son in the world, I wanted to hold onto myself and I feared that I would lose the person I’d known for over 40 years — the woman who saw the kind of career she wanted and spend two graduate degrees trying to get there. Yes, I wanted a baby - I went through grueling IVF treatments to have them. It was about as intentional of a choice as you can make with regard to reproduction. But it didn’t negate the fact that I also wanted to matter in all of this when it came to my career and drive to succeed. I wanted to know that I could keep the spark alive that I worked so hard to cultivate all of those years prior.

At that point in my life, anything less than moving up the proverbial career ladder was an indictment that my edges were softening. Interestingly, it took becoming a mother for so many parts of my life to open up to a third way of doing things — not the binary, black and white approach to live that I was so accustomed to. But one that brought in shades of gray and nuance that only came to me because I became a mother. Did I need to become a mother to have these revelations? No, but it was the path that I took to get there.

Now let’s talk about the choice to stay in your current company and leveling up. In my previous company, I held three roles over the course of 6 years. And none of those lateral moves came at convenient times. I started at the company in the middle of my Executive MBA program after a short stint at another company that didn’t end up being a good fit. The switching cost was great — I’d just done it a year prior at another company and now I was going to do it again in the middle of my final global project that was due a month later. But it needed to be done. The second move happened within the first 8 months I returned from mat leave into a marketing function that was net new to me. And the last move happened just 4 months after my return to mat leave with my second child. That role brought me into a new product line that was one of the hottest areas of tech at the time. After I accepted the role, I was told that there were several hundred applicants for the role — an indication of how sought after this area of tech would become.

Neither of those two internal roles gave me a formal promotion or increased compensation at the time (due to company policy with internal transfers) — though I most definitely saw them as a promotion given the competitiveness of the roles and the increased responsibility that both afforded me. But accepting both of those roles made me well positioned years later to accept a role at an external company when I was recruited years later In THAT move, I leveled up my career in ways that I never could have if I didn’t have the previous experience when I moved laterally in my company.

So today, I’m here to talk about how staying in your company can sharpen your edges and lay the groundwork for new roles unavailable to you because you lack the experience to be accepted into those opportunities.

The cost of switching roles that often gets over looked

When I moved to my current company, I was so focused on whether it was the right next move for me that I didn’t realize what it would ask of me — building new relationships, earning trust, figuring out who actually influences projects, new technology (Teams > Slack 4ever). I wrote a little about it here. While some of those same asks happened when I transitioned internally in my previous company, my reputation preceded me, I knew the tools, and the products I supported were different, but complementary.

When you leave the ecosystem you’ve built for years and years, everything gets zeroed out. You start from scratch with rapport, credibility. That’s capital you’ve compounded for years that you’re walking away from. Capital that makes it easier for you to ramp into a new role and learn a new skill much easier than if you’ve started over in a new company.

You can’t put a price on that kind of capital but you feel the cost of it when you move into a new role.

Internal moves are a lot like arbitrage

Arbitrage is when you see two different prices on an item. You buy the cheaper one before someone else does, and then you resell it at a higher price to make a quick profit. For example: you see a pair of like-new Visual Comfort lamps being sold for $350 a pair at an estate sale. They cost $1000 online for the pair brand new. You buy them and resell them for $900 on FBMP and pocket the profit.

In the analogy, you see a lateral move in your company and a role external to your company. You choose the internal role and pocket the profits: your reputation stays intact. You know who really influences projects. You know the leader you’re moving under. And you don’t even have to turn your computer back in.

A transfer doesn’t spend the capital you built on your team, it redeploys it. You keep the trust and the institutional fluency and point them to a new problem, role, or set of learning opportunities. You do it because the opportunity is too great to pass up. And while you might be “leaving money on the table” by not redeploying elsewhere, you’re building a better base for when you do negotiate out of your company.

Don’t play down the benefit of institutional knowledge

Once you’ve made it through one full cycle of seasons in your company, you have an inside view into how the company runs — which orgs are getting resourced, which leaders are ascending, where budget is actually flowing versus where it is supposed to go on paper. An external candidate is betting blind on a job description and three interviews. Maybe there’s a distant former colleague who tells you it’s great, while benefitting from your referral bonus. With an internal move, you’re placing an informed bet on a team you’ve watched, negotiated with, and worked alongside for months.

So how do you do this without being labeled a flight risk or problem for your current manager?

Making this kind of move requires that you’re intentional, genuine, and a bit calculated with your approach. Your move isn’t out of the company, it’s a sideways reinvestment into the success of your organization.

This part lives behind the pay wall.