Dr Evans O. Boamah, Assistant Professor at Durham University Business School, UK, says Ghana’s labour market may be shifting, with more professionals advancing their careers within existing organisations instead of changing employers.
Dr Boamah, who doubles as a Certified Public Accountant, said recent LinkedIn career data on professionals in Ghana between January 2025 and April 2026 showed that internal career movements substantially exceeded movements involving changes of employers.
He told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that more than 10,000 internal career moves were recorded in January 2025 alone, compared with approximately 3,300 moves to new employers.
He said promotions were also common, with more than 1,000 promotions recorded in most months during 2025, suggesting that career advancement was increasingly taking place within organisations.
Dr Boamah explained that the trend was important because it showed that professionals did not always need to change employers to progress in their careers.
He said employers consider developing existing employees, as it provides significant benefits because such employees already understand their organisations’ systems, customers, operations and workplace culture, noting that providing opportunities for promotion, training and movement across roles could help businesses retain valuable skills and institutional knowledge while reducing the costs and uncertainties associated with external recruitment.
He said the development of employees from within could also strengthen staff retention, particularly when workers saw clear opportunities to build their careers within their organisations.
He noted, however, that the external labour market remained active, with about 2,000 professionals changing employers in many months during 2025.
He said the figures demonstrated that organisations continued to compete for skilled workers and therefore could not rely solely on recruitment to meet their talent needs, adding that competitive compensation, professional development, positive workplace culture and clear career pathways could influence whether skilled employees decided to remain with an organisation.
The Certified Public Accountant said international movements represented a relatively small proportion of the career transitions observed, with most movements occurring within Ghana.
He, however, stressed that the findings should not be interpreted to mean that skilled migration was no longer a concern because LinkedIn represented only a segment of Ghana’s workforce and could not capture every migration decision, saying that the available evidence nevertheless suggested that many Ghanaian professionals continued to build and advance their careers domestically.
He further explained that digital career data could complement traditional labour market statistics by providing additional insight into how professionals moved between jobs, organisations, industries and countries.
Also, the emerging trend was important for Ghanaian businesses and policymakers because career progression was not occurring only through changes in employers but also through substantial movement within organisations.
He therefore encouraged organisations to recognise that the competition for talent could increasingly be determined not only by their ability to recruit skilled workers, but also by their capacity to provide existing employees with genuine opportunities to stay, grow and succeed.
