LinkedIn connects nearly 740 million professionals and 55 million companies. To each other. To opportunities. Professionals come to connect with their community, learn, and grow their careers. Companies come to find, hire, and develop talent.
Professionals and companies are at the heart of our platform. And ultimately it’s these two groups that will lead the world to a more diverse and inclusive future. Because they come together on LinkedIn, we are uniquely positioned to create equal access to opportunity and help drive more equitable outcomes for all members of the global workforce where:
Professionals can build strong networks and access opportunities regardless of demographics. A new LinkedIn survey shows 40% of Black professionals say the biggest obstacle in their career is not having a clear path or opportunity for advancement at their organization. We can help change that by using our platform to help people strengthen their networks, elevate diverse voices, and have important conversations on diversity and equity in the workplace -- such as our new Conversations for Change series that this month focuses on shining a light on the experiences of Black professionals.
Companies -- as the engines of economic opportunity in how they hire, promote and pay -- have the data and tools to accelerate their ability to create diverse workplaces. We’re collaborating with our customers to share insights and learnings and to build the best possible products to help them meet their own goals. Our recruiting tools enable hirers to mitigate bias by simply hiding the picture or name of a candidate, surfacing insights to help recruiters calibrate how their hiring process is impacting outcomes, and widening their talent pools by taking a skills-based approach. We’ve also unlocked a diversity, inclusion, and belonging LinkedIn Learning path, with courses viewed by more than a million people from more than a hundred thousand companies. Think about the impact when people start to understand the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. It begins to permeate through their companies. That's when real change happens.
LinkedIn strives to be a company that reflects the diversity of our communities in our workforce and is a place where all belong and thrive. In addition to ensuring that we meet our measurable diversity goals on who we hire, we are also investing in educating our entire workforce to better understand what equity means and how it is manifested in their respective roles. And I’m proud to have Imani Dunbar take on the role of leading our equity strategy across the company.
This is not a month-long project, but rather a journey. Systemic change takes time. But we’re making progress. Beginning today, our members in the U.S. will see a prompt in their LinkedIn profile to self-identify by sharing their demographic information. For more on self-identity, check out this post. Our engineering teams have committed to designing or updating the AI systems that power LinkedIn to spot potential bias and have open sourced our work to make it accessible for others to do the same.
Together we can help ensure that when two people with comparable skills and similar experience are looking for a job, they’ll have the same opportunities regardless of their demographic. We’re committed to this journey and we’ll continue to take steps toward helping drive more equitable outcomes for all professionals.