The corporate career ladder has always had a hidden dependency: the manager standing at the bottom of it.
Who gets spotted, who receives an opportunity and who gets nudged towards a different role often depends not simply on what an employee can do, but on whether the right person happens to notice.
Myntra is attempting to reduce that dependency through SkillVerse, a skills and learning system embedded within a broader career framework called Mynfinity. The ambition is to make internal mobility more transparent and systematic, and less dependent on informal relationships or managerial goodwill.
“SkillVerse is not being treated simply as another learning platform,” says Govindraj MK, chief human resources officer. “It is part of a larger framework intended to bring together skills, learning, career development and internal opportunities.”
The problem it is trying to solve is familiar. Job titles frequently conceal transferable capability. Someone in one function may already possess many of the skills required elsewhere, but unless the employee, the hiring manager or HR happens to recognise the connection, the opportunity can remain invisible.
SkillVerse is Myntra’s attempt to make those connections visible at scale.
From job codes to skill maps
Myntra’s skills work predates SkillVerse.
“SkillVerse is not being treated simply as another learning platform. It is part of a larger framework intended to bring together skills, learning, career development and internal opportunities.”
Govindraj MK, CHRO, Myntra
The company first defined job codes, identified the skills associated with different career tracks and developed what it calls career affinity: a map of where capabilities from one role could reasonably translate into another.
A few months after joining and completing induction, employees assess themselves against the skills relevant to their role group. The result is not intended to become a permanent rating. Employee and manager discuss whether the assessment reflects actual capability and where development is needed.
The system can then begin connecting the dots.
AI can identify skill gaps, suggest mentors and recommend projects or learning programmes. A few months later, employee and manager return to the conversation. The question is no longer simply whether the employee completed the learning, but whether the capability has improved and is visible in actual work.
That distinction matters. Learning systems are very good at counting courses. They are considerably less useful when asked whether those courses changed what somebody can actually do.
Myntra is trying to connect the two.
Internal job postings sit within the same ecosystem, allowing employees to see roles for which their skills may make them eligible, subject to the company’s mobility policies.
Cross-functional movement already existed at Myntra. Employees have moved from business roles into product, from marketing into business and, in some cases, from HR into business roles.
Govindraj says SkillVerse is not creating mobility from scratch. The intended difference is democratisation: making opportunities visible beyond the employees who happen to be in the right conversation at the right time.
When aspiration runs ahead of readiness
Greater visibility creates another problem.
An employee may discover a role they want and then discover they are not yet ready for it.
Myntra treats that gap as a development question. Where someone wants to move into another area, development can become more individualised: a particular project, a mentor with relevant expertise or an intervention aimed at the specific capability that is missing.
That is potentially more useful than sending an entire cohort through the same programme. It also makes career development less abstract. Learning has a destination.
The system creates continuity too. A career conversation that once existed primarily between an employee and manager can disappear when that manager changes. A skills architecture can preserve some of that history and make development less dependent on managerial memory.
It cannot remove judgement altogether.
Self-assessments are imperfect. Managers bring their own interpretations and biases. Skills themselves change as jobs evolve. A skills marketplace is therefore only as useful as the quality of the information continually feeding it.
Myntra is still early enough in the journey to acknowledge that.
Govindraj says a more meaningful assessment will come six to twelve months into adoption, when internal movement, promotions and self-directed learning behaviour begin to show whether employees are actually using the system to build careers differently.
The manager problem
The harder challenge is not technological.
It is managerial.
Managers have traditionally been gatekeepers of internal talent. They identify high performers, allocate stretch assignments, recommend people for opportunities and, sometimes, hold on to good employees because losing them makes their own team weaker.
A skills marketplace does not automatically remove that instinct. If anything, it makes the tension more visible.
Myntra is therefore training managers not only to attract talent, but to enable movement and allow employees to grow beyond their immediate teams.
The organisation can also begin spotting patterns. If someone has remained within the same team for three or four years, the question can be asked: is the employee choosing to stay, or is something preventing movement?
That subtly changes the governance of internal mobility.
A manager is no longer responsible only for building the strongest possible team. The manager is also expected to develop people who may eventually become valuable somewhere else in the organisation.
Therein lies the contradiction.
Companies routinely tell managers to develop talent while rewarding them for the performance of the team they currently lead. Releasing a strong employee may be good for the enterprise while creating an immediate problem for the manager.
No skills platform can resolve that contradiction on its own.
Careers without straight lines
Govindraj sees the underlying structure of careers changing too.
Traditional organisational pyramids, in his view, could gradually give way to smaller teams assembled around particular missions. Careers would consequently become less linear. Employees might move sideways into another domain, join a different mission or accumulate depth across several areas rather than spend their careers climbing within one function.
He uses a sporting analogy. Different players suit different formats, and teams select them accordingly. Expertise remains valuable even as the configuration of the team changes.
For organisations, that creates more flexibility.
For employees, the proposition is more complicated.
The corporate world may talk increasingly about lattice careers, breadth and lateral experience, but promotions still carry status, compensation and a visible sense of progress. Employees have to believe that moving sideways today will not leave them behind tomorrow.
Managers have to believe something equally difficult: allowing a strong performer to leave the team is evidence of good leadership rather than a talent loss to be prevented.
That is why SkillVerse ultimately depends on more than the quality of its skill maps.
What the system can, and cannot, change
Myntra plans to track internal movement, roles filled from within and, eventually, reductions in external hiring as indicators that SkillVerse is doing more than creating a better-organised learning ecosystem.
Those measures will matter because visibility is only the first step.
A system can tell an employee that her skills could translate into another role. It can identify what she still needs to learn, recommend a mentor and show her the vacancy.
It cannot make her manager comfortable with losing her.
That is the more interesting experiment inside SkillVerse. Myntra is trying to shift internal careers from a model in which opportunity is mediated largely through individual managers towards one in which skills and opportunities are visible across the organisation.
Technology can make the marketplace transparent.
Whether talent is genuinely free to move through it will still depend on people.