• Job rotation helps employers assess employee skills, identify future leaders, create well-rounded employees, and improve organizational agility.

Organizations often use job rotation training to expose employees to a variety of business experiences which have been compressed into a relatively short period of time. An organization’s job rotation program can be formal or informal. However, the more formal and structured the program is, the more quantitative the measurements of employee skill levels will be.

A typical job rotation cycle can last from one to two years, depending on the size of the organization. Each assignment in the rotation can last from four to eight months.

There are four major benefits that organizations get from job rotation:

• The first is that managers, with input from human resources (HR), can assess new employees’ skills and use that information to determine where the person should be placed after the job rotation cycle ends.
• The second benefit is that HR can use the information gained from each manager’s review of the employee to identify future leaders. This in turn allows those employees to be groomed and nurtured to move into management and/or executive-level positions.
• The third benefit is that job rotation allows the employee to be exposed to the organization’s culture across various business units, including foreign locations. This will also help in the career pathing process because employees have a chance to experience living in different environments. This can help workers decide where the person is interested in living after the job rotation cycle ends.
• Risk management is the focus of the last benefit. Because employees have worked for different managers and have gained a wide variety of business knowledge, the employees are able to step into different jobs when there is a need (for example, during a period of an increase in retirements, resignations, or layoffs).