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Articles by Scott Nicholson

  • How has our economy evolved in the past five years? Which industries are shrinking or growing through these challenging economic times? These are some of the questions that the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) delves into each February in the “Economic Report of the President“ (ERP). This year, the CEA worked with us to glean further insights into industry trends both during the recent recession and after its end in June 2009 [1]. With the data and methodology [2] in hand, we calculated the growth rates in industry size between 2007 and 2011. Here’s what we found:

    The fastest-growing industries include renewables (+49.2%), internet (+24.6%), online publishing (+24.3%), and e-learning (+15.9%). Fastest-shrinking industries were newspapers (-28.4%), retail (-15.5%), building materials (-14.2%), and automotive (-12.8%). Instead of the growth in percentage terms, we also examined the volume of job gain / loss by industry, as indicated by the largest bubbles in the figure above. Our data show that even through the recession, the industries with the largest volume of employment growth (the largest circles on the figure above) were internet, hospitals & healthcare, health, wellness & fitness, oil & energy, IT and renewables. On the other side of the story, retail, construction, telecommunications, banking, and automotive had the largest volume of job losses between 2007 and 2011. Some of the most interesting insights came from looking at how the size of industries change as the country enters and emerges from the recession. Below is a figure depicting how industry size fluctuated by year:

  • Women are more savvy networkers in the ranching industry. Men are more savvy networkers in the cosmetics industry. Wait, what? That was exactly our reaction when we saw the initial results for our latest data insights blog post on the differences in social networking behavior between men and women.

    The overall result in the US is that men are overall more savvy networkers than women, but the real insights start to surface when you start slicing and dicing by industry and company. Check out the infographic below highlighting some main insights, followed by more details and discussion below.

  • 100 million gumballs

    March 22, 2011

    As of today we have 100 million professionals on LinkedIn! It’s an enormous number and a milestone that we are very proud to reach.

    While our early adopters from May 2003 could have a (huge!) party, it would be a bit difficult for all 100 million of us to physically get together and celebrate. Turns out we could do it in a Boeing 747, but in order to do so we’d have to shrink our bodies down to the size of 0.96-inch (24.4mm) diameter gumballs!

  • Given the growing excitement in the USA around this weekend’s Super Bowl, our Analytics Team thought it would be fun to dive into the LinkedIn data to understand our members’ enthusiasm for the Steelers and Packers. Could we discover what team the majority of LinkedIn professionals will be cheering for on Super Bowl Sunday? To find out, we immediately stopped searching for recipes for 7-layer dips and hot wings and logged into our database.

    Two pieces of data give us some insight into what team a LinkedIn member may be rooting for. First, LinkedIn Signal allows anyone to filter their network’s status updates by company, industry, school and location. We used this data for all of LinkedIn’s members to algorithmically determine status updates with positive sentiment towards a team (for example: “Go Pack Go!”). We also assumed that members who went to school in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania are likely to be cheering for their respective team.

  • Today is Veterans Day here in the US where we honor those that have served in the military. The most recent statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show a worsening employment situation among veterans. In these challenging economic times we dug into our data to see if we could identify useful insights relevant for veterans. We also put together a list of LinkedIn tips for veterans, from veterans who work at LinkedIn.

    There are nearly half a million LinkedIn members with U.S. military service listed on their profile. For these veterans, here are the top 10 industries in terms of the total number of LinkedIn members currently working in that industry: