Most people run one job search. They update the CV, refine the LinkedIn summary, start having conversations, and apply the same approach whether the opportunity is three floors up or at a completely different company.
That’s the mistake. An internal move and an external move are fundamentally different exercises. They require different evidence, different visibility, different timing, and in some cases, an entirely different version of you in the room. Treating them identically usually means doing both badly.
The motivation underneath each one is often different too
It’s worth being honest about why you’re drawn to one over the other, because the underlying motivator is often genuinely different depending on which direction you’re looking. An internal move is frequently about doubling down on what you’re already good at: going deeper into a strength, growing the scope of something you’ve already proven, building on credibility you’ve spent time accumulating in that specific environment.
An external move is more often about testing something different: deploying a skill in a new context, finding out whether what you’re good at travels, or pursuing a version of mastery, recognition, or impact that the current organisation simply can’t offer no matter how well you perform there.
Neither is more legitimate than the other. But conflating them creates confusion. If what you actually want is to deepen and extend something you’ve already built, an external search asking you to start over somewhere new may not serve that motivation at all. And if what you actually want is to test yourself somewhere genuinely different, staying internal to chase the next title might satisfy the goal without ever touching the real motivator underneath it.
The evidence you need is different
Externally, you’re largely unknown. The CV, the interview, and the references are doing almost all the work, because nobody in the room has direct experience of you. The story has to be self-contained and persuasive on its own terms.
Internally, the opposite problem applies. People already have a view of you, accurate or not, and that view was formed doing your current job, not the one you’re now asking for. The CV barely matters. What matters is whether you’ve already demonstrated, visibly, that you can operate at the next level, in ways people actually noticed at the time. If you haven’t, the internal move often requires more groundwork than the external one, not less, because you’re trying to overwrite an existing impression rather than create a fresh one.
Visibility works in opposite directions
For an external search, visibility means making sure the right people outside your organisation know what you’re capable of: a strong LinkedIn presence, a network that extends beyond your current employer, conversations that put your work in front of people who could hire you elsewhere.
For an internal move, visibility means something narrower and more specific: making sure the particular people who’ll make or influence that decision have seen you do the particular thing the new role requires. Broad visibility doesn’t help much here. What helps is being known, specifically, for the capability the move depends on, by the small number of people whose opinion will actually count.
Running both simultaneously is entirely possible. What doesn’t work is assuming the same activity serves both. Posting thought leadership content might build your external profile while doing nothing for the internal one, and vice versa.
The interview itself is a different conversation
External interviews are largely about proving competence from scratch: can you do this, have you done it before, how would you approach it. Internal interviews, where they happen at all, are often a different test entirely. The panel already believes you can do the job adequately. What they’re actually testing is whether you can be trusted with the level of autonomy, visibility, or risk the new role carries, and whether you can be seen differently by people who’ve only ever seen you in your current capacity.
This catches people out more than almost anything else. They prepare for an internal interview the way they’d prepare for an external one, focused on proving capability, when the real question in the room is about trust and reframing, not competence.
A question to sit with
If you’re currently exploring a move, internal, external, or both, what’s the actual motivator behind each one, and is it the same motivator, or genuinely different?
And whichever one you’re focused on, what specific evidence does it require, and have you been building the right evidence for it, or just one generic version that happens to serve neither particularly well?
