Beating the downturn: Online learners move fast to rewrite their career paths

Money is tight these days for Michael Medrano, a 30-year-old MBA graduate of Texas Tech University. He's on furlough from his job in Richardson, Texas, as a call-center operations manager, and he’s hoping to be rehired as the economy gradually reopens. In the meantime, he says, "I don't want to lose a step."  

So in recent weeks, Medrano has gone back to school -- at least as an online student. He spent $80 to earn a certificate in SQL databases, and another $140 to gain online expertise in the project management techniques known as agile scrum. For less than a single month’s car payment, he’s added a timely dash of tech on his resume. 

Medrano isn’t the only one hoping such new skills can translate into better opportunities with today’s employers, or the flexibility to switch industries if necessary. People in industries ranging from public administration to retail are quietly turning their laptops into personal reskilling centers.

This career restlessness emerges as a major trend in the latest edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index. The desire to master new skills correlates closely with the way members feel about their current prospects. In industries where optimism is scarce, people are most likely to seek training outside their current specialties. Results are based on a survey of 5,399 U.S. LinkedIn members between May 18 and May 31. 

Every recession redefines industry outlooks in profound ways, creating new lists of losers and winners that can last for many years. In the 2008-09 recession, when manufacturing took a pounding, both businesses and governments struggled with limited success at retraining experienced factory workers for new industries.

The current, pandemic-related downturn might be different. Shelter-in-place constraints have taken their hardest toll on the service sector, which often employs younger workers whose career plans remain fluid. In the best-case scenario, the pool of available jobs does rebound, rewarding idled workers who build Chapter 2 of their career plans on their own. 

In that case, the stage is set for rapid -- and quite constructive -- job-switching once the U.S. economy comes back to life.

“Now is the time for companies to double down on their learning budgets and commit to reskilling,” McKinsey consultant Sapana Agarwal and three colleagues recently argued in a position paper. These authors are counting on corporations to reorient workers to a more digital focus suited to what’s now being called the “distance economy.” In fact, many employees and managers may be headed that way already -- on their own.

Lists of desirable new skills vary widely, but reskilling specialist Wesley Conner offered the following top five in a recent Fast Company article: artificial intelligence, problem solving, data analytics, emotional intelligence and digital marketing.

The reskilling push is especially intense in public administration, where 32% of online learners in the latest Workforce Confidence survey cited the desire to open new career paths as their reason for taking online courses. Other standout sectors include design (32%), retail (31%), entertainment (28%) and nonprofits (25%).

All those percentages are up substantially from their levels a month earlier. And in all those fields, employees’ confidence about their own prospects is lower than average.

To a slightly lesser degree, the reskilling movement is touching media and communications, recreation and travel, education, energy and mining, consumer goods and hardware and networking, too. In all those sectors, at least 20% of people taking online courses are doing so as a potential career pivot. 

As for people in no hurry to uproot, the real estate sector stands out. In that industry, where optimism is running high, only 8% of online learners have new career paths in mind.

Other notable findings from the latest Workforce Confidence Survey are as follows: 

The most upbeat financial outlook is not where you’d expect. People with a high-school education or less are the most likely to expect increases in wages, their investment profiles and spending. They’ve pulled ahead of all other levels of education, perhaps because they are strongly represented in “essential services” that haven’t been cut in recent months.

Remote work’s biggest fans are in these job functions: human resources, finance, information technology, product management and marketing. Those are some leading areas where respondents expressed the most comfort with work-at-home. By contrast, remote work is more polarizing for those in healthcare services, operations or military and protective services functions.

Workforce Confidence Index Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey that is distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000+ U.S.-based members respond each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners & retirees are excluded from analysis so we’re able to get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. 

Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for. Confidence index scores are calculated by assigning each respondent a score (-100, -50, 0, 50, 100) based on how much they agree or disagree with each of three statements, and then finding the composite average score across all statements. Scores are averaged across two waves of data collection to ensure an accurate trend reading. The three statements are: [Job Security] I feel confident about my ability to get or hold onto a job right now; [Finances] I feel confident about my ability to improve my financial situation in the next 6 months; [Career] I feel confident about my ability to progress in my career in the next year.

 Neil Basu and Ben Tjaden from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.