Helping more than 1.6 million people in the UK learn digital skills

COVID-19 has further exacerbated an already uneven playing field when it comes to securing a job. It has brutally impacted lives and livelihoods, stunted dreams and made it harder for many to do the things they love.

At LinkedIn, we’ve been asking ourselves over the past year, “what can we do to help?”. In June 2020, we made a joint commitment with Microsoft to help millions of people around the world learn digital skills through our free online learning courses at opportunity.linkedin.com, with a goal of helping them connect to new opportunities. Today, I’m proud to share that we’ve helped 30 million people, including more than 1.6 million in the UK, develop some of the digital skills needed for today’s most in-demand jobs, and we’re extending the availability of these courses through to the end of the year. Here you can find courses on technical “hard” skills like digital marketing, project management and programming languages, as well as essential “soft” skills such as emotional intelligence, communication and critical thinking.

We often talk about the importance of developing skills because we believe that skills are the key to opportunity for job seekers and the engine of growth for businesses. With 5% of the UK workforce currently unemployed (1.7 million people), we want to help people better understand the value of their skills and showcase them to potential employers and recruiters so that they can secure new jobs quickly.  

New features to help job seekers, freelancers and small businesses connect to opportunity

New features such as Cover Story, which will be rolled out globally starting today, can help people share their story in a more engaging way through video. If you’re a job seeker, Cover Story is a great way to share more about your career goals and demonstrate your soft skills to recruiters and hiring managers through your LinkedIn profile. If you’re a freelancer or business owner looking to grow your business, you can attract new customers and clients by using Cover Story to talk about your services and expertise, and also create a dedicated Service Page right from your profile listing the services you offer. 

Job seekers can also use Career Explorer to find jobs that match their skills, Skill Assessments to showcase their proficiency for hard skills, and the #OpenToWork profile photo frame to signal to employers that they are looking for new opportunities. More than 6 million people are using the #OpentoWork photo frame today, and they receive on average 40% more messages from recruiters and are 20% more likely to receive messages from the broader LinkedIn community. 

Helping companies hire candidates based on their skills

We’re also partnering with Microsoft to help 250,000 companies around the world hire candidates based on their skills. Traditional hiring practices of assessing people on their formal qualifications and experience means that so many capable people that are currently unemployed, or facing unemployment, risk being locked out of the job market since they may not tick all the “right” boxes. To make hiring fairer and more effective, we believe companies must place greater emphasis on skills and overall potential when assessing candidates. This will improve the diversity of their workforce, fill vital skills gaps, and ensure that UK workers don’t get left behind. 

We’ll be piloting Skills Path - a new way to help companies hire for skills - with organisations that are committed to broadening their hiring practices to better include candidates with diverse experiences such as Gap Inc., TaskRabbit and BlackRock. By bringing together LinkedIn Learning courses with Skill Assessments, we can help recruiters source candidates in a more equitable way - based on their proven skills. We’re also creating a common skills language through the LinkedIn Skills Graph to help people, companies and government improve workforce planning, hiring and development programs. 

These are just some of the steps we’re taking to ensure hiring is fairer, more dynamic and ultimately more impactful for our members and for businesses. If your organisation is interested in how it can make the move to skills-based hiring, you can find out more about Skills Path here.