Latest / The Internal Move Podcast with Fexingo: Lateral Roles, Internal Transfers, and Staying at Your Company / How an Internal Transfer Can Build Your Proof-of-Concept Portfolio
Transcript
- Lucas: One thing you don't hear often in the career advice world is the idea of using an internal transfer to build what I'd call a proof of concept portfolio. Luna: proof of concept portfolio—meaning you use the new role to deliver a small, visible win that proves you can do something you haven't done before? Lucas: Exactly. And if you've found value in episodes like this, where we get concrete about these strategies, listener support is what keeps us ad-free. You can help us keep going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure—just a way to keep this kind of focused career advice available. Luna: Totally. Even a small contribution helps us avoid sponsored interruptions. Now back to that portfolio idea. Lucas: Right. So let me give you a real example. I spoke with a woman named Maria. She was a customer support rep at a mid-size SaaS company—about 800 employees. She wanted to move into product analytics, but she had zero experience with data tools. Luna: Classic catch-22: can't get the role without the skills, can't get the skills without the role. Lucas: Exactly. But she noticed that the support team was logging all customer complaints in a shared spreadsheet—thousands of rows, no analysis. Meanwhile, the product team was making decisions based on gut feelings about what customers wanted. She saw a gap. Luna: So she pitched a lateral transfer to the product team as a 'data support analyst'? Something like that? Lucas: Almost. She went to the product director and said, 'I want to build a dashboard that aggregates support tickets into actionable insights for your roadmap. Let me do a three-month rotation to prove it works.' The director agreed because it was low-risk: no permanent commitment, no extra headcount. Luna: Smart framing. She leveraged her insider knowledge of the customer pain points and offered a concrete deliverable upfront. Lucas: Exactly. She spent three months learning SQL and Tableau on nights and weekends—free resources, nothing fancy. Then she built a dashboard that categorised every support ticket by feature, severity, and frequency. It saved the product team 200 hours a month of guesswork. Luna: 200 hours? That's huge. So what happened after the three months? Lucas: She got a permanent offer as a product data analyst—a double promotion from support rep to analyst, plus a 15 percent raise. But more importantly, she had a ready-made case study for her next move, whether internal or external. Luna: That proof of concept became her portfolio piece. And I'm guessing her manager was happy because the dashboard also made the support team more efficient. Lucas: Right. So the framework here has three steps. Step one: identify a gap between what you already know and what the business needs but isn't doing. Step two: propose a temporary lateral move—ideally a rotation or a pilot project—that directly addresses that gap. Luna: And step three: deliver a small, measurable win that's visible to decision-makers. That's the proof of concept. Lucas: Exactly. I've seen this work across functions. An engineer transferred to sales engineering by building a demo tool over a weekend. A marketer moved to product by running a beta test campaign that generated five hundred qualified leads. The common thread is they didn't wait for permission to learn—they offered a trade. Luna: A trade of your current salary and position for a chance to demonstrate new capabilities. It's risky, but the downside is limited because you can always go back. Lucas: And that's why this is different from a standard internal transfer. You're not just swapping desks. You're buying an option on a future role by making a tangible bet on yourself. And you're making it easy for your employer to say yes. Luna: What about the pushback from the current manager? Maria's manager lost a good support rep, even temporarily. Lucas: Good question. Maria actually involved her support manager in the pitch. She framed the dashboard as something that would make her manager's team more data-driven, too. And she promised to document her support processes so a temp could cover. That's key: you have to solve your current manager's problem first. Luna: So you're essentially making a business case to both sides. I've seen data on this—LinkedIn did a survey in 2025 of internal transfers, and they found that 41 percent of people who completed a visible project within the first six months were promoted within a year. Lucas: That's a striking number. And it supports the idea that visibility—not just time served—drives promotions. The proof of concept forces that visibility. Luna: Exactly. So if someone watching today wants to try this, what's the first step they can take this week? Lucas: Pick one business problem in your current company that you've seen up close. It could be a reporting gap, a manual process, a customer pain point. Then figure out which team owns that problem. That's your target for a lateral move. Luna: And then you craft a one-page proposal: here's the problem, here's my approach, here's what I'll deliver in three months. No promises, just a pilot. Lucas: Right. And be honest about what you don't know—offer to learn it on your own time. Most managers will respect the hustle. Maria's director later told me that what sealed the deal was her willingness to learn SQL before the rotation started. Luna: So she front-loaded the risk. That's a good lesson: don't ask for a transfer to learn; show that you've already started learning, then ask for a chance to apply it. Lucas: Exactly. And that turns the internal transfer into a career accelerator rather than a simple lateral move. You're not just shifting sideways—you're building a portfolio that makes you more valuable inside and outside the company. Luna: It's a smarter version of the 'quiet quitting' narrative. Instead of disengaging, you re-engage on your own terms. Lucas: I like that framing. And it's a nice way to wrap: if you feel stuck, maybe the move isn't to leave—it's to build a proof of concept that opens a door you didn't know existed. That's what Maria did, and it changed her career trajectory.