From left, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Techonomy
According to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the world has about 600 million “knowledge workers”—the professional class that spends much of its workday in front of a computer. Of these, he says, more than half have a profile on LinkedIn.
Yes, he wants to get the other half to join his company’s business-centric social network. But that’s only the start of his ambition, Weiner told an audience of CEOs and entrepreneurs this week at Techonomy, a technology and business conference held this year in Half Moon Bay, California. More than just professionals, Weiner says, he wants to get everyone on LinkedIn—and, in the process, find everyone a job.
“We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take…to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce,” Weiner said.
In Silicon Valley, such high-flown rhetoric is standard fare, and no doubt talk of such massive growth pleases shareholders. But even just as a thought experiment, LinkedIn’s utopian goal raises interesting questions about the relationship between transparency and economic growth. What does the global economy look like if everyone were on LinkedIn?
In the same way that Facebook is based around the concept of the “social graph”—real-life social connections mapped through a digital network—Weiner says that LinkedIn today is built around the “professional graph.” To reach its goal, however, he says LinkedIn must transform itself into the “economic graph.”
‘We are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce.’
In practice, he says, that means a LinkedIn profile for all of the world’s 3 billion workers, not just white-collar professionals. He wants every company in the world—a number he puts at 70 million—to have a profile on the network. In Weiner’s ideal world, every job opening would be posted on LinkedIn. The site would also become a catalog of every skill needed to obtain every job, and these would link to LinkedIn profiles of every school and university where those skills could be obtained.
“What we ultimately want to do…is digitally map the global economy,” Weiner said. “Our objective is to take a step back and allow capital, all forms of capital—intellectual capital, working capital, and of course human capital– to flow to where it can best be leveraged.”
Lining Up Work
The concept of “flow” is the crux of every digital social network—connections made radically more efficient by the internet and mobile technologies. But while connecting on Facebook is an end in itself, on LinkedIn those connections are just a means. Putting up a profile on LinkedIn is a signal in itself of a desire for professional advancement—and employers come to LinkedIn looking to hire.
Everyone on LinkedIn wants something, which makes it a little less like Facebook and a little more like Amazon. LinkedIn is a massive marketplace, except instead of consumer goods, what’s being bought and sold is work.
Weiner’s vision of the economic graph is a utopian vision of bringing a kind of ultimate transparency to that marketplace. If every worker, every job, and every skill is known (and searchable), then theoretically nothing should hinder the flow of supply and demand. In the real world, inequality and unemployment are hardly just a function of imperfect information.
But Weiner did offer a more practical illustration of the economic graph in action. A more comprehensive, more inclusive LinkedIn, he said, could serve up data that, when aggregated on the city level, could show how the skills of the current workforce and the skills needed for available jobs weren’t lining up. Schools could see that skills gap and come in to bridge it, a kind of three-part marketplace where everyone is working toward a kind of equilibrium.
The Rate of Innovation
In Weiner’s eyes, one of the biggest challenges is how rapidly the demand for particular skills and knowledge changes. During other periods of technology-driven upheaval—the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the information revolution—people always had some time to catch up. Not so now, Weiner said.
“The rate of innovation is exceeding our ability to train people to take advantage of the opportunities those innovations create,” Weiner said. “It’s not years anymore. It’s months. It’s weeks.”
With better information available, however, Weiner believes schools can create “just-in-time curriculums” that meet the real needs of real economies more efficiently. Getting everyone on LinkedIn might not get everyone a job. But like dieters using calorie counters, more information about the mismatch of supply could mean a more bracing clarity about where the real problems in the economy lie.
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