Every day, LinkedIn’s more than 450 million members add new connections, update their profiles, and share their professional insights. And employers post jobs, and make hires. Every public action they take on LinkedIn gives us a clearer snapshot of the global workforce, and results in what we call the Economic Graph -- a digital map of the global economy that includes every member of the global workforce and their skills, all open jobs, all employers, and all educational institutions.
Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce -- all three billion of them. The Economic Graph helps us achieve our vision by helping us provide valuable insights and products and services to members like you, employers, educators, policy makers, academics, non-profits, and other leaders.
To help us achieve our vision, we’re excited to have on board Guy Berger, LinkedIn’s first economist. He’s working with others at LinkedIn to help surface, interpret, and communicate data from the Economic Graph to everyone -- from members like you who want to know where there’s demand for people with your skills, to policy makers who want to understand their city’s skills gaps, to educators who want to know what skills are in-demand among employers so they can tailor their curriculum to ensure students get the skills they need to qualify for open jobs.
Here are a few examples of the work Guy and the Economic Graph team have done this year:
- Today in partnership with the New York Times, they uncovered what it takes to become an executive. And earlier this month in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, they shed light on the growing demand for soft skills, and which soft skills are most sought after among employers.
In January, they identified the hottest skills of 2015 to give 2016 job- and training-seekers a sense of what skills they need. That report found that “2015 could be seen as the year cloud and distributed computing graduated from a niche skillset to a more prominent skillset in the global workforce.”
In April, they analyzed job-hopping behavior on LinkedIn and uncovered that the average number of companies professionals worked for in the five years following graduation has nearly doubled since 1986. And that women job-hop more than men.
We’ve also provided more than 50 cities across the globe with insights into their workforces, including our work in Colorado and Arizona to up-skill workers and narrow those states’ skills gaps.
And soon we’ll introduce what we call the LinkedIn Skills Gap Index. It provides insights into 50 North American cities’ skills gaps, and migration trends. Insights from the Skills Gap Index will be particularly useful to members like you because it will show you which skills are most sought after among employers and where those skills are in demand.
To get the latest insights that can help you advance your career, follow Guy on LinkedIn or @linkedinecon, or watch him talk directly about the importance of skill building and the Economic Graph in this short video: