A Strategic Design Model for Internal Workforce Transitions

Project Overview

Designing proactive workforce transitions for retail banking employees facing role disruption.

This project investigates why internal mobility often fails, even when reskilling and redeployment programmes already exist. By focusing on employees navigating role transitions and HR teams managing workforce change, we identified 4 systemic failure points in current transition models: technical fragmentation, risk-averse culture, emotional disengagement, and weak strategic coordination. In response, we developed FutureForge, an MVP service concept focused on role exploration, peer signals, and decision support instead of reskilling content.

The project was developed as a strategic MVP concept, and its behavioural logic, service direction, and organisational relevance were tested through paper prototyping, feedback, and co-creation workshops with sector experts. These activities built an evidence base for a more proactive internal mobility model and clarified the potential value of such a service for both employees and banks.

Problem Framing

The scale of disruption was observable at the sector level, but the pathway through transition remained unclear at the employee level.

Across secondary research on UK retail banking and primary interviews with employees experiencing role change, the same pattern appeared at both sector and organisational levels. In retail banking, 54% of roles were identified as high-risk for automation, underscoring the scale of disruption facing the sector.

Interview participants described internal transitions as reactive, unclear, and difficult to navigate. One employee reported that workers were often asked to reapply for their own roles during change. These data points were used not to explain why transitions were failing, but to establish the problem condition: a large transition need existed, while the existing internal mobility experience was not being used as a trusted or accessible route.

01 Macro Level

02 Micro Scope

Problem Definition

We defined the problem through systemic breakdowns in how internal transition was structured and experienced.

Despite encouragement to reskill, internal transitions remained reactive, with limited visibility into next roles and low employee confidence. Reviewing existing workforce transition initiatives showed that many interventions improved isolated HR processes, but did not support transition as an ongoing, employee-centred journey. Across sector research, precedent analysis, and employee interviews, the same breakdowns appeared repeatedly. We clustered these observations into four failure types — technical, cultural, emotional, and strategic — to move from scattered symptoms to a clearer problem model for the next stage of design.

Design Principles

The service needed to increase employee agency while working with HR to reduce systemic friction.

System mapping and multi-actor journey analysis showed that transition breakdowns were not confined to employees alone. HR, managers, and employees moved through the same change process with different expectations, fragmented support, and misaligned timelines. This made it clear that redesigning the transition as an employee-only experience would not be enough.

This led to a dual design principle: for employees, to make the transition more navigable, build confidence, and foster agency; and with HR, to reduce systemic friction and create the operational conditions for internal mobility to work in practice. These principles anchored the project in both human need and service viability.

From Reactive to Proactive Transitions

The core intervention was to move support earlier, before disruption forced employees into reactive decisions.

Mapping the as-is and to-be journeys showed that support in the current model began too late, often only after a disruption had occurred. Employees were expected to act once roles changed, rather than being prepared beforehand.

To address this, we reframed the journey around a proactive transition model supported by a behavioural mechanism: self-awareness, discovery, goal-setting, and continuous development. This shifted the service from helping people cope with change after the trigger to helping them recognise options, build readiness, and navigate transition earlier.

What We Chose to Test

The prototype was designed to test whether clearer role visibility and decision support could change transition behaviour.

Once the transition model was defined, we narrowed the prototype to the most critical points for early employee action. Analysis showed that employees were not blocked first by a lack of learning content, but by uncertainty around realistic next roles, readiness, and decision-making.

We prioritised role exploration, peer signals, and decision support as the first elements to test, while leaving broader reskilling content out of scope. This turned the prototype into a focused way to examine whether the service could make the internal transition feel clearer, more navigable, and worth engaging with.

“If employees could better understand their current readiness and adjacent options, they would be more likely to engage proactively in internal transitions. “

Prototyping & Validation

1. Prototype Testing (Simulation workshop)

Early prototype testing examined whether clearer guidance could make the internal transition feel more actionable and achievable.

To test the first version of the service, we conducted a simulation workshop using paper-based prototypes and role-based scenarios of workforce transition. The prototype focused on self-awareness and discovery features, including empathetic nudges, a skills-demand heatmap, comparison profiles, and career-pathway routes.

The session showed that personalised prompts and visual tools helped participants make sense of future options and lowered some of the uncertainty around action. At the same time, the test exposed three design gaps: the flow needed clearer guidance, practical decision-making information was missing, and personalisation had to be grounded more directly in individual profile context.

2. Co-creation & Validation

Co-creation with sector experts was used to stress-test the service logic and organisational viability.

In a second workshop with the Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC), we focused on validating whether the service model was both desirable and viable for real banking contexts. This session first surfaced key barriers to mobility—fragmented systems, low psychological safety, and unclear ownership—before testing the core service concepts against these constraints.

Feedback from the workshop reinforced a central hypothesis: employees respond better to guidance than mandates, and the transition feels more achievable when tools offer clear, data-informed options tied to real opportunities. In addition, the workshop clarified adoption conditions—such as trust, usability, and integration with existing systems—which shaped the next iteration of the concept, extending impact beyond interface refinement alone.

Proposed Intervention

FutureForge translates workforce transition into a structured behavioural flow.

FutureForge is a lightweight internal mobility platform that supports early-stage role exploration for employees while providing HR team

s with aggregated insight into transition patterns across the organisation. The concept is designed not as a collection of isolated features, but as a four-stage flow that supports proactive transition: self-awareness, discovery, goal-setting, and continuous development. These stages help employees understand their current skills and risks, explore relevant pathways, define realistic next steps, and stay engaged through small prompts and ongoing feedback. This structure allows the service to support both individual action and organisational visibility.

The concept was intentionally structured to respond to the four failure types identified earlier: integrating fragmented signals, increasing employee agency, reducing emotional friction, and aligning individual pathways with workforce planning.

Projected Impact

By turning fragmented transitions into clearer and earlier pathways, the concept creates value for employees, HR teams, and long-term workforce planning.

FutureForge is designed to create value at both the employee and organisational levels. For employees, it supports earlier role visibility, greater confidence, and more actionable transition decisions. For HR and L&D teams, it provides clearer signals about workforce readiness, capability gaps, and emerging demand for transitions.

Over time, this could reduce avoidable hiring and onboarding costs, improve retention of internal talent, and strengthen organisational resilience by retaining institutional knowledge during change. More strategically, the concept reframes internal mobility from a reactive redeployment process into a proactive workforce capability model aligned with future role evolution.

What this project reframed

This project showed that workforce transition is not only a reskilling issue, but a service design problem shaped by timing, trust, and employee agency.

Even where learning provision exists, employees struggle to act when pathways are unclear, and support arrives too late. The most important shift in my thinking was to frame transition as a coordinated service rather than a standalone training offer.

At the same time, the project exposed a practical limitation: while the concept was validated through prototyping and expert feedback, organisational readiness was not tested in a live setting.

In a real deployment context, the next step would be a contained pilot focused on adoption conditions, particularly integration, ownership, and whether employees engage with the service early enough for it to change behaviour.