Our skills-first vision for the future

Our CEO Ryan Roslansky shared an article today about our company’s unique opportunity to help create a skills-first economy that meets the moment. 

That’s why today we’re introducing new data and tools to help companies take a skills-first approach to talent development, as well as features that empower our members to take their careers into their own hands. 

• How we’re helping companies to hire and develop talent

  • We’re bringing skills to the forefront in LinkedIn Recruiter so hirers can easily search and filter for candidates who best match their skill requirements. We’ll also show suggested skill matches, showing hirers an expanded pool of qualified talent based on the skills they’ve previously searched. 

  • We’re investing in accelerating the capabilities of our skill-building platform, LinkedIn Learning Hub. Later this calendar year, employees will be able to pinpoint the skills they need to be successful in their organization – easily discovering engaging, role-specific content and internal job opportunities based on their career goals. 

  • And as we focus more on enabling internal mobility, we’re welcoming members of the Paddle HR team to LinkedIn and tapping their expertise to help us deliver on the talent development needs of our customers.

• How we’re helping members develop skills and stand out 

  • Soon, we’ll provide the ability for members to add context about certain skills on their profile. As members add more skills to their profile, we can better match them to job opportunities based on those skills. 

  • We’re also introducing LinkedIn Learning Pathfinder – a new experience to help anyone learn the skills they need for their next step – all free until April 30, 2022. Members will simply need to choose a career goal, discover new skills needed to help achieve their goals, and get a list of LinkedIn Learning courses customized for those goals. 

We’re seeing a steady progression toward a skills-based labor market

Chief Economist Karin Kimbrough outlined a skills-first blueprint for better job outcomes in her latest Data @ Work newsletter. Here are the key insights: 

• Jobs are changing, even if you’re not changing jobs. The skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double.

• The value of learning and skills development is becoming increasingly clear. LinkedIn members are adding 286 million skills to their profiles in 2021, up 22% from the year prior. 

• Skills-first hiring is gaining traction. 40% of hirers now use skills data when hiring on LinkedIn, up 20% compared to a year prior. What’s more, these skills-first hirers are 60% more likely to find a successful hire.

We’re seeing the rising importance of the L&D leader to help create a skills-first world

LinkedIn published our sixth annual Workplace Learning Report focusing on how L&D has become more central, strategic and overworked amid the Great Reshuffle. Some of the key findings include: 

• L&D has led the way through the Great Reshuffle with 72% of L&D professionals agreeing that L&D has become a more strategic function at their organization in 2021, and 79% agreeing it’s less expensive to reskill a current employee than to hire a new one.

• Job posts, promotions and budgets are increasing: there was a 94% increase in demand for L&D specialists between July and September of 2021 compared to April - June 2021, and L&D pros saw 15% more promotions this year compared to the rest of the HR function

• But there are challenges for L&D pros as they take on more. Last year, L&D learners spent 35% less time learning compared to their HR colleagues and 23% less time learning compared to all active learners.

Learn more about how our world of work is changing and its impact on the talent marketplace by joining our virtual event, Forward. The replay will be available on the event page soon!