LinkedIn Skills Assessments: A Disruptive and Strategic Move

This week LinkedIn introduced an important new offering, the availability of adaptive skill assessments for more than 50 “skills” in technology and other software applications. While the initial offering is not designed for big companies to use across their entire workforce, I believe this announcement is very disruptive and has the potential to impact the entire HR marketplace.

(Note LinkedIn also released research pointing out that 69% of professionals believe verified skills are more important than a college degree. Plus 89% of hiring managers now validate skills before hiring, regardless of degree!)

The Important Role of Skills and Complexity of Assessment

Hundreds of studies have now shown that “reskilling” and “upskilling” is the key to career and organizational success. More than 40% of CEOs believe this is their number one issue, and study after study now show (MIT, IBM, more) that constant reskilling is the key to a prosperous future. In fact, the latest research by MIT clearly points out that income inequality in the United States is directly related to the “underskilled” workforce, which has fallen behind in this new age of automation, AI, and robotics.

That said, the problem of “assessing skills” is complex and problematic. If you want to validate your skills in Microsoft Excel, for example, should you test your ability to create a spreadsheet? Design a pivot table? Develop a compelling chart? Or rather your skill in modeling a problem, statistically analyzing data, or perhaps cleaning-up a big messy spreadsheet?

Someone has to decide “how to measure a skill,” and today this exercise is left to a set of for-profit skills assessment companies, some professional associations, and corporate recruiting and hiring managers. The reason recruiters hire people based on their college degree is that college pedigree is supposedly a surrogate for skills. We believe (perhaps incorrectly) that people who graduate from college can think, write, study, and solve certain problems.

In the case of technical skills, there are a wide variety of ways to assess and measure skills. There are what we call “high-stakes testing” (like the SAT), where you sit down, take a test, and either pass or fail. These tend to measure very specific skills, and they are heavily biased by the developer of the test and his or her perspective on “what capabilities are needed” to solve a given problem.

In most companies skills assessment in hiring is a daunting challenge. Companies give software engineers coding problems, quizzes, and oral interviews to understand their level of understanding. I used to ask research analyst candidates to prepare and give presentations before we hired them. Sales leaders may ask candidates to “sell them something” – and of course Southwest Airlines asks their flight attendants to “tell a joke” to assess their sense of humor.

Supporting all this effort, the testing market is large and fragmented. Many vendors provide certified skills assessments on their products (Microsoft certification, Oracle certification, Cisco certification, etc), focused on assessing and these are developed by working with customers to understand in great detail what professionals need to know how to do in order to use these products effectively.

Companies like Pearson and Pluralsight (Skill-IQ) have spent millions of dollars creating highly validated assessments, and many of these are “adaptive.” In other words, the test gets “tougher” the better you do, so it can essentially “learn what you know” and then identify your level of expertise, not only your ability to pass or fail

LinkedIn’s Role in Skills

Many years ago, when LinkedIn was first launched, I suggested to the product team to create an assessment interface so third party assessments could be “plugged in” to LinkedIn. At the time the company was building out the Recruiter business, so they were focused primarily on talent acquisition – and this never came to pass. Instead, LinkedIn created a simple feature called “recommendations” which serves as an abstract “skills assessment” because the network can crowdsource what others think you’re good at.

This feature, which I expected to be a bit of a problem, did grow – and today you can find people’s “inferred skills” through recommendations. LinkedIn uses this data quite frequently to help recruiters and others find experts, and from a social networking standpoint it has added great value. But it’s limited, biased, and not altogether actionable.

Enter LinkedIn Learning. Assessments Now Matter

Then LinkedIn came along and got into the learning business. In the company’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the company acquired Lynda.com and has since been building hundreds of courses on dozens and dozens of topics. LinkedIn Learning is now one of the largest providers of off-the-shelf technical and professional education, so people want to know “how do I decide what to learn?”

Well the only way you really know “what to learn” is to understand “what you know today.” Enter the world of assessment. The LinkedIn Skill Assessments are being built by the same people who author many of these courses, so they are designed to assess your “basic knowledge” and “core skills” in a given topic.

Fig 1: LinkedIn Skills Assessments

What Level Of Skill Is LinkedIn Assessing?

I asked the product management team “what level of skills are you going after” and their answer was “we want to assess skills for someone who has roughly a year of experience in this domain.” I call that a “level 2” assessment, which for many people is a hugely valuable thing to know.

In our Josh Bersin Academy we assess skills with five levels, along the lines below:

• Level 1: Novice. I don’t know what this is.
• Level 2: Knowledgable. I have done this before and I could do it again, but I’m learning.
• Level 3: Experienced. I have done this many times under different conditions, so I’m confident I could do this well.
• Level 4: Expert. I have done this under many conditions in many situations and I consider myself an expert.
• Level 5: World Class. I could write a book and advance the state of knowledge on this topic.

In the case of the LinkedIn Learning assessments, the tests are designed to assess basic knowledge, and if you score in the 70th percentile, you “pass.” So they are really a proxy for “can you do this reasonably well."

Fig 2: LinkedIn Skills Assessment Example

What's The Value To You?

These tests are very useful in many ways.

First, it’s important to understand that LinkedIn is very focused on you as a user, so any assessment you take (whether you pass or fail) stays confidential unless you decide to publish it. So consider these tests as a forgiving way to “test your knowledge,” “assess what you may need to know next,” and possibly promote what you know to others.

And there are quite a few already available. The starting list of 50+ assessments includes something for everyone:

• Tech: Java, HTML, R, XML, Amazon Web Services, Bash, Hadoop, Python, WordPress...
• Design: Dreamweaver, Keynote, Lightroom, InDesign, Final Cut Pro... 
• Architecture: Autodesk Maya, Revit...
• General: Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat...
• Accounting: QuickBooks

For Professionals and Learners

If you’re a passionate professional (who isn’t these days?) this LinkedIn Skills Assessments let you identify your own personal skills and then decide what to do next. The system recommends courses based on your results, and gives you the option to take any of those recommended courses for free (access lasts for 24 hours after clicking “start”)! This in itself is a huge value, and it helps LinkedIn gain much more data about the nature of skills in the workplace and the way these assessments can be improved.

By the way, research also shows that the best learning occurs when you make mistakes. So I'd suggest you take the tests just to nudge yourself to learn more.

Fig 3: LinkedIn Assessments Recommend Jobs and Courses

For Recruiters

If you’re a recruiter, these assessments will start to show up as passed badges next to skills on candidate profiles. This means you can be assured that this candidate “knows the basics” in the areas they show, and you are not “flying blind” and assuming someone’s resume is accurate.

Fig 4: LinkedIn Recruiter Can Search For Candidates Based On Skill

You still need to interview and reference-check candidates, because the tests are very specific and topical. They may tell you that someone knows the basics of Java, for example, but they may not tell you if they know how to code Java for a real-time IOT application.

But these assessments will give recruiters very strong, validated signals in many areas – and if Assessments takes off, I would see recruiters using them as screening criteria. If you’re hiring a secretary or analyst, for example, and they don’t know Excel or Word or basic statistics, you could ask them to take these assessments to verify.

For Job Candidates

If you’re a job candidate, these assessments may or may not become instrumental. I would guess that time will tell how important they become, but if you’re new to a domain and want to “break-in” after school or another educational investment, I’d recommend you try them. The assessments are “risk-free” and if you pass, you have a way to verify your skill. It also gives you an opportunity to stand out for your skills no matter what school you went to or what your background is.

Fig 5: Recommended Jobs Based On Your Assessments

Once you take these tests, LinkedIn will show you jobs that ask for these skills - making your job search easier. Remember, everything in LinkedIn is data and AI-driven – so your entire experience as a job seeker may become better once you start this process.

Why This Is Disruptive

A final point. Why is this new feature disruptive for the market?

Well, one of the most important things going on in companies right now is “skills assessment” and “upskilling” or “reskilling” people. When your company buys new learning programs, decides to hire new people, or goes through a reorg – there is a massive effort to try to assess the skills gaps that need to be filled. This is a complex and difficult process, and there are hundreds of consultants and tools to help.

If LinkedIn Skill Assessments start to take off, companies could start to use them as a way to profile and develop their workforce – which would drive even greater adoption of LinkedIn Learning and possibly dramatically reduce the value of LMS, LXP and other assessment systems. I’m not saying this will happen overnight, but the value of a LinkedIn network-based assessment vs. a standalone assessment from a small vendor is very high. Even large consulting firms will be impacted: they need to understand how these assessments play in their market.

Second, the assessment market itself is going to have to adapt. Assessment companies are often expert-led technology companies that specialize in test technology, testing methodology, and curating and developing intellectual property form experts. These companies are all being threatened by this announcement. Sure LinkedIn’s assessment are level 2 and relatively new, but the momentum is huge and as this feature takes off many of these vendors will have to adapt.

Third, think about LinkedIn (and Microsoft’s) competitors. Companies that sell content which competes with LinkedIn Learning or sourcing and recruiting tools that compete with LinkedIn Recruiter (Indeed for example) must now deal with this new "signal" in the workforce. It’s quite possible these assessments results will be open to API search, so any sourcing and recruiting tool could find them. (Think about them like Yelp ratings.) This gives LinkedIn and Microsoft market power. Imagine, for example, if Excel itself looked at this data and coached you how to use its tool better. The options are mind-boggling.

Fourth, and something I’m sure LinkedIn executives have to think about: now that LinkedIn has more than 645 million professionals on the platform, the company has an enormous responsibility to make sure these assessments are accurate, responsible, and positioned well. If LinkedIn Skill Assessments over-state your qualifications (or under-state them), it could have a massive impact on the job market, so the company now has to keep these tests up to date, accurate, and relevant. This is an expensive proposition – but one I believe LinkedIn is committed to making.

Bottom Line: This Will Be A Big Deal

The bottom line is that this is not just a “feature” being added to LinkedIn. Skills Assessments could become an enormous new platform to validate skills and capabilities, helping create economic opportunity for many parts of the global workforce. I know LinkedIn is just starting this offering, but to me the possibilities are endless. And now that LinkedIn is part of Microsoft, there are many exciting directions ahead.

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Josh Bersin is a global industry analyst who studies corporate HR, talent, leadership, recruitment, and all aspects of HR and workplace technology. He is the founder of Bersin by Deloitte and the Josh Bersin Academy, a frequent speaker at industry events, and consults with organizations around the world. You can reach Josh here on LinkedIn or on Twitter at @Josh_Bersin . (Disclosure - Josh provides consulting and advice to brands, including LinkedIn.)