REDEFINING WORK

As the CEO of LinkedIn, I think a lot about how to connect the world’s professionals to help them become more productive and successful. That’s been LinkedIn’s mission from the start, which means that while we may be a technology company, we’re actually in the people business, helping you grow your networks, your knowledge, your skills, and your companies. It’s no surprise then, that almost everywhere I go these days, someone invariably asks me the same questions: “What is happening with AI and work, and what does it mean for me?” With that in mind, I wanted to share my view of what’s happening, what it means for each of us and the ways that LinkedIn – as a platform and as a community – can help us all better understand and manage a moment of change that will fundamentally alter how we build careers and companies. 

 AI is starting to usher in a new era for work. Most immediately, AI will start to change how we work, taking on more and more of the drudgery we like least in our days. Things like helping with the first draft of an outreach email, or doing the first check for errors in a budget document. But that’s just the start. Over the coming years, AI is also going to change the very definition of work. At LinkedIn, we’re already starting to see that play out as we look at the new skills that employers are adding to job postings and that members are adding to their profiles. As you would expect, AI-related skills like machine learning are on the rise, and companies are increasingly looking for AI-related talent – for example, the share of job postings on LinkedIn mentioning GPT or ChatGPT has increased by 21X since November 2022. But – and this is what I’m paying most attention to right now – there is also an increase and demand in soft skills such as communication and flexibility. In fact, 72% of US Executives agree that soft skills are more valuable to their organization than AI skills. 

This signals an exciting possibility, one where people skills become more essential to individual success and where people-to-people collaboration becomes more essential to company success. I believe we are in the early days of a world of work that is more human than before, giving us the chance to do more fulfilling work, and to do that work more easily and effectively with others.

Work in the age of AI

For two decades now, LinkedIn has been the place where talent and opportunity meet. When this happens at massive scale, hundreds of millions of people all over the world find new jobs, learn new skills, make new connections, and launch new careers and companies. As we look ahead at the next chapter, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to help the world understand and manage the changes that widespread adoption of AI at work will bring to how people build careers and companies.

And this is precisely where we are investing to help, making it easier for everyone to understand and find opportunity in the three main changes to work I see coming:

1. AI will accelerate workforce learning, and heighten the importance of skills

2. AI will facilitate collaborative innovation and bridge communication gaps across cultures, geographies, and industries

3. AI will reshape the definition of a career path

AI will accelerate workforce learning, and heighten the importance of skills

People access economic opportunity mainly through jobs. And for generations, the way we’ve defined jobs is by job titles. As AI starts to change how we work, it’s going to force us to change how we define jobs. Instead of job titles, we all need to start seeing any job as a collection of tasks, and understand that those tasks will change regularly as AI continues to advance. The best way to stay on top of – or better yet, get ahead of – job changes will be with a skills-first mindset.

Take your current job as an example. Put aside your job title for a minute and instead break your job into the top tasks that you do every day, and then bucket those tasks in the following ways:  

1. Tasks AI can fully take on for you, like summarizing meeting notes or email chains.

2. Tasks AI can help improve your work and efficiency, like help writing code or content.

3. Tasks that require your unique skills – your people skills – like creativity and collaboration.

With a skills-first mindset, you can start to see what skills you need to stay competitive in the job you have, or, if most of the tasks in your job fall in that first bucket, what new skills you need to get to move into new roles or even a new career. Jobs are changing on you, even if you’re not changing jobs. And while that’s been true for some time – with the average LinkedIn member having seen the skills needed for their job change by 25% over the past eight years – AI is going to meaningfully accelerate that pace of change. By our latest estimates, that number is expected to reach at least 65% by 2030.

This level of change means that skills-first thinking matters for employers as well as employees. Bringing a skills-first approach to the center of talent management is the surest way to expand your talent pools, upskill your current employees, and build agility into your workforce. Those who will be the most successful in jobs in the age of AI are going to be the agile ones that embrace growth as a virtuous cycle: your growth, through learning and development, fuels company growth while company growth, through innovations in business strategies and cross-functional collaboration, fuels your growth. 

We recognize this, and it’s why building AI into our talent products isn’t new for us. We’re constantly making improvements so that those of you hiring can attract the best possible candidate with the right skills for the role. Here are some examples of how we’re doing that:

• We recently launched Skills Match within LinkedIn Recruiter so that recruiters can see candidates’ whose skills match the roles they are hiring for. And Resume Search automatically pulls relevant skills from a candidate's resume into Recruiter.

• We’ve also used AI to update our recommended matches feature in Recruiter, enabling those of you hiring to see real-time, personalized recommendations based on your hiring activities, candidates’ job-seeking activities, and key information from job posts – helping you discover up to 10% more new and qualified candidates.

And we also have tools for those of you looking to grow your skills:

• LinkedIn Learning has more than 21,000 courses that can help you learn the skills you need to acquire, taught by the best instructors in the world, and easily accessible anywhere and anytime. This includes more than 300 AI courses, including a free Generative AI Professional Certificate learning path. As you learn new skills, add them to your profile to get connected to the growing and changing opportunities. 

• Another way to learn and collaborate on LinkedIn is through our community. Our members possess a mind-blowing 10 billion years of professional experience. And we’re unlocking that knowledge through collaborative articles – AI-powered conversation starters developed with our editorial team that are matched with relevant experts who contribute their lessons, anecdotes, and advice based on their professional experience. 

• We also have experts across industries sharing their knowledge on LinkedIn that you can follow, engage with, and learn from. For example, if you want to learn more about AI, follow experts like Bernard Marr, Cassie Kozyrkov, Greg Coquillo, Morgan Cheatham, Allie Miller, and Tomasz Tunguz. And check out our recent editorial coverage, including more top voices to follow, on what the rise of AI means for workers and how it’s already changing key industries.  

AI will facilitate collaborative innovation and bridge communication gaps across cultures, geographies, and industries

By the day we’re seeing more and more articles and research describing the ways that AI is already lessening our workloads, increasing our impact, and freeing up time for us to do more of the creative and collaborative work we enjoy most. That’s been welcome news to professionals. Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index showed that 70% of workers would like to delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads and, at LinkedIn, our estimate is that over 80% of our members are in a position to use AI to automate at least a quarter of the mundane and repetitive tasks that we do every day. If you think of AI as an always-available, personalized assistant that you can use across so many things you do, you start to see the possibilities. 

For teams and leaders, the opportunity with AI is even bigger. We know that the best ideas come about when people come together and use their collective experience and knowledge to collaborate and innovate. AI has the ability to not only free up more time for you to focus on collaborative work, but it will also make it easier for you to do that kind of work by breaking down barriers that have always stood in the way of personal connection and collaboration at scale. Think of all the barriers we encounter at every step of any collaborative effort. Language barriers across countries and cultures. Knowledge barriers across industries and functions. Skills barriers across experience levels and socioeconomic backgrounds. AI will reduce those barriers, making the context we need to more effectively engage with other people easier to understand. The result will be an era of greater innovation and growth at the companies that invest in it now.

Across LinkedIn we’re using AI to help you focus more on the collaborative and higher-value work where we as humans can really make an impact. Here are some examples of how we’re doing that:

• We’re using generative AI to help recruiters save time and focus on the more strategic parts of the hiring process – like speaking to and building relationships with candidates. We’ve added AI-assisted messages in Recruiter to help with the first draft of personalized messages to candidates, which can be customized based on location, skills and workplace type. 

• We’re also testing AI-powered job descriptions to help you find qualified candidates more quickly.

• To make marketers more efficient, we’re rolling out AI-generated ad copy suggestions in Campaign Manager using advanced OpenAI GPT models. 

• We’re constantly improving how we use AI across our B2B solutions to help marketers and sellers reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right time, measure conversations with accuracy, train our bidding models, surface insights about accounts and leads, and aggregate signals to connect with buyers. 

And if you’re looking for new opportunities, we’ve also launched a number of new Premium features powered by Generative AI to help: 

• Personalized profile writing suggestions take existing content on your LinkedIn profile to help you craft engaging Headline and About sections – which can lead to nearly 2x the number of opportunities. 

• To make it easier for you to reach out to hirers, we’re starting to roll out personalized writing suggestions for Messaging to get you started. 

• Once you land an interview, we have prep tools so you can prepare for commonly asked questions, as well as AI-powered feedback on pacing, how often you use filler words, and phrases to avoid.

AI will reshape the definition of a career path

It used to be that you picked a job, you picked a company and then, for the most part, you spent your career rising up as far as you could in that role at that company. Sometimes you'd switch where you work. Rarely, if ever, would you switch what you did. That 'ladder' mindset was anchored by two truths: first, that stability and predictability were what people craved most and second, that people came into a job with an education that set them up to succeed not only at the start of their career, but across their career. All of that is starting to change.

A while ago I wrote a post about how we all used to see career paths as linear, and are now recognizing that they can also be a squiggly line filled with pivots. AI is only going to accelerate this trend, and make it virtually impossible for a one-off moment of learning to last an entire career. 

The pace at which we all need to learn, and the need for us to demonstrate what we’ve learned across our careers, is rapidly increasing. And in many ways, the future of work is becoming intertwined with the future of learning. We all need to have a growth mindset that is able to adapt to the changes starting to happen. But you’re not alone. We’re all on this journey together, and your network and platforms like LinkedIn can help. 

We’re also going to start to see employers become educators, “training to hire” into ever-changing jobs through onboardings, apprenticeships and academies, as well as “training to promote” into ever-changing roles through upskilling and tours of duty that take employees into new functions and perhaps even new careers.

At the same time, it’s critical that employers, across industries, are thoughtful about what this means for their people, ethical about how they bring in AI, and invest in the training and development their talent needs. We also have to recognize that people who are part of historically marginalized communities are the most vulnerable to change and most at risk of getting left behind. We’ve seen this happen across past industrial revolutions, where not enough has been done to engage these communities early. Greater cross-sector outreach to these communities and investing in skill building can help. These efforts could help lead to expanded access to opportunity for these communities.

Redefining work in the age of AI

We’ve seen change like this before. As the internet became more mainstream in the 1990s, the conversation was very similar to the one we’re having today. This new technology was seen by many as a threat to people, to jobs and to companies. Sound familiar? Jobs were lost, and there were challenges in the early days. But new jobs were also created. In fact, 60% of employment in 2018 was found in jobs that didn’t exist in 1940. Where some companies stalled, others surged, giving way to new sectors and industries and, ultimately, new levels of economic growth all over the world. And now as we look back at the past three decades, the internet has helped people grow their skills, and created new jobs and companies.  

I believe the same will be true with AI.

In a moment of change, you can dwell in fear and uncertainty or you can rise to meet it. This is precisely where LinkedIn is ready to help. Our platform and community is a place where you can share and gain knowledge about AI, learn and demonstrate new skills, find new opportunities, and leverage the power of our learning, recruiting, marketing and sales products to unlock growth. We’re moving quickly to use the context we have from our data, combined with the technological capability we have, to provide you with the tools and insights you need to navigate this moment of change.

We are in the early days of a new era for work, and what it ultimately becomes is up to us. Together we can shape work in the age of AI to be more human and more fulfilling.