What are we going to do about Brexit?

That the Brexit vote was a surprise to most business leaders is no secret. Ever since the result, we have all been trying to make sense of what it means for our companies, and what we should do next.

In the days after the vote, I turned to our platform to try and better grasp what happened. We’re proud to have some of the most desirable job opportunities in the UK advertised on LinkedIn, and I made a quick comparison of how many of these opportunities are open to those in the Brexit and Remain heartlands. The results of this snapshot are telling: when you look at the top five Brexit and Remain cities, there are three times as many people competing for each available job where the vote went to Brexit.

I have asked myself: is our vision of economic opportunity reaching widely enough, and if not, what more can we do to make sure it does? Finding the answer to that question has meant going back to the foundations of what we’re here to do.

Four years ago Jeff Weiner, our CEO, set out the vision for the ultimate destination for our company: the Economic Graph; a digital map of the global economy which identifies the connections between people, jobs, skills, companies, and professional knowledge, and spots in real-time the trends pointing to economic opportunity. 

In the DNA of this vision is the idea that connections and movement are good, and that information and people should be free to travel to wherever they are needed and best utilised. Brexit can be interpreted as not everyone being aligned with this core philosophy.

The vote is the most significant electoral decision of our generation, and has the potential to drastically alter the opportunities open to British and European workers in ways that cannot now be fully understood. At the same time this is perhaps the first such event in a developed economy, in the era of tools such as LinkedIn.

And so when we went back to our core mission, with this new context, it was obvious what we should do: we’re going to use our unique data to show how this seminal event affects the lives of our members.

We’re going to do this to do with three objectives:

1. We want to provide our members with the insight and understanding of what effect Brexit will have on their careers, and supply them with the information to overcome challenges, and find opportunity.
2. We want to provide our customers, in talent, marketing and sales, with the knowledge they need to be top of their game.
3. We want to provide policy makers and business leaders with insights into the world economy that are faster and deeper than others can offer.

We started that work some time ago and today we deliver the first results, with the release our data on EU to UK professional migration to the Financial Times. We reveal that professional migration is dominated by the EU, and the EU27 supplies some of our most educated workers. We also see that some of our most important sectors have the most to lose from a Brexit talent block.

In October, we’ll look at the perspective from the other side of the channel, and publish information on real-time movements between the UK and EU, and on the European countries that stand to lose-out if denied access to British talent.

And in November, we’ll begin a quarterly bulletin on job seeking behaviour, tracking changes in willingness to move into the UK from the EU, and vice versa.

Brexit has reminded us of the importance of our mission, the scale of our vision, and the power of our platform. We’re going to rise to this challenge and do everything we can to enable British and European professionals to succeed.