2026 LHH Career Mobility and Outplacement
Trends Report
The Mobility Breakdown
New global research reveals the hidden forces driving redundancies, eroding trust, and stalling internal mobility.
New global research reveals the hidden forces driving redundancies, eroding trust, and stalling internal mobility.
Organisations aren’t navigating occasional restructuring anymore. They’re operating in perpetual adjustment, without the systems, skills visibility, or mobility infrastructure needed to keep up. This data-based content series reveals the realities shaping today’s restructuring climate from both the employee and employer perspectives.
Now in its third year, the report serves as LHH’s flagship annual study on global workforce transitions. It examines how organisations and employees navigate redundancies, redeployment, and career reinvention, offering proprietary insights that help HR and business leaders design more adaptive, human centered workforce strategies.
Leaders understand the cost of losing talent, and many recognize that rebuilding capabilities later often requires a much bigger investment than retaining them upfront. With instability now structural, leaders need planning systems, skills intelligence, and mobility infrastructure to enable redeployment at scale.
Leaders feel they’re providing support, but employees don’t see it. As redundancies accelerate, the divide deepens: 73% of workers witnessed job losses in their team last year, and 1 in 4 lose trust in leadership as a result. The impact is reshaping culture, confidence, and retention. From the leader perspective, 64% of HR leaders say restructuring and redundancies negatively impact their own confidence in their fellow leaderships team.
Few leaders measure the metrics that would reduce redundancies
HR teams are absorbing the emotional weight of constant change while lacking the systems and data needed to shift away from redundancies.
HR leaders say they are blocked by five systemic barriers that make talent redeployment unachievable.
HR leaders identify their top barriers to effective mobility:
1. Lack of strategic, long-term skills planning
2. Insufficient AI and analytics
3. Leaders unwilling to let go of their talent
4. Employees unmotivated to pursue internal roles
5. Ineffective manager-led career conversations
What happens during redundancies is shaping the perception and loyalty of those who stay.
The top 5 fallout effects employees feel after restructuring:
Explore actionable insights and tools designed to help leaders address the forces driving redundancies, stalled mobility, and rising worker anxiety.
Analysis of more than 418,000 workers supported through LHH Career Transition Services found that nearly 6 in 10 displaced employees move into a different occupation after a layoff. Discover how workforce transformation is reshaping careers and what leaders can do to build redeployment and mobility strategies that keep pace.
This infographic examines the growing misalignment between short‑term reductions and long‑term talent needs, examining why companies continue making cuts even though 73% say rehiring is more expensive. With 87% planning layoffs in 2026, it highlights the loss of critical capabilities as a preventable outcome when organisations use a holistic approach, integrating mobility, outplacement, and redeployment to retain skills and maintain continuity.
Leaders should view internal mobility and redeployment like a modern severance program. With only 32% tracking mobility savings, 30% tracking redeployments, and just 19% of employees recognizing mobility programs, this playbook outlines the metrics and actions to scale redeployment effectively.
With 58% fearing a layoff will damage their long‑term prospects and 56% doubting their skills, employees now fear irrelevance more than unemployment. Anxiety has shifted from the macroeconomy to personal marketability and the levers to reverse that shift may be simpler than leaders expect.
Layoffs ripple far beyond those leaving, with 72% witnessing cuts on their own teams and reporting drops in morale, stability, and trust. With nearly half of employees willing to record their layoff, the real story is how quickly culture and brand can shift in a single moment.
LHH partners with your organisation to understand your needs and provide the expertise, strategy, and transition support required to keep your workforce strong through every stage of change.