LinkedIn Skills Finder
Introduction
As I previously wrote here, I’ve been continuously learning about Product Management and in that regard, at Product School, I did a project on ‘LinkedIn Skills Finder’.
As popularly recorded by McKinsey & Co, in the next decade, there’ll be an oversupply of low-skilled workers and an undersupply of high-skilled workers. So the global workforce needs skills upgrade to balance the supply and demand of the market. LinkedIn, which aspires to help find economic opportunity for the global professionals, has its work cut out. To tackle this challenging task, CEO Jeff Weiner proposed the concept of economic graph in his talk about LinkedIn’s vision for the next 10 years.
After listening to this talk, I started working on a feature to integrate all major MOOCs with LinkedIn. However LinkedIn bought Lynda.com in early 2015, so I modified my initial design to effectively integrate Lynda.com with LinkedIn. My motivations to take up this project were the following:
- As a recent college graduate, I know how MooCs can effectively change the classroom education in the long term.
- I believe that recruiting in the future would mainly rely on the skills that one has more than their formal education.
- LinkedIn as a professional network with more than 400 million professionals is well placed to tackle this ambitious problem.
(I don’t work for LinkedIn and this project was done in Q1 2016, before Microsoft bought LinkedIn)
What’s working for LinkedIn
Today, there are more than 400 million registered LinkedIn professionals in over 200 countries, of which 40 million are students and recent college graduates. There are about 6 million job postings and two new members are joining LinkedIn every second.
During one of the user interviews, one of the users said,
LinkedIn is definitely the first place I go to for professional networking and job search.
What’s not working for LinkedIn
Although they are growing, they are not growing as fast as they used to. And in 2015 they made the costliest acquisition in their history and they have to start getting the best value out of this acquisition.
When I asked users about what services they use the most to learn a new skill, I found out that Lynda.com was one of the least popular services.
User research
Before jumping onto a feature recommendation, I wanted to understand the user and their pain points, for which I conducted both user surveys and user interviews. With the survey, I wanted to understand,
- How do users use LinkedIn?
- How often do they use LinkedIn?
- What services do they use the most?
- What other products do they use for job search?
- What products do they use to learn a new skill?
Through user interviews, I was looking to gain insights into user context, usability, their joys and frustrations with LinkedIn. What I found out about user behaviour during a job search and when they were thinking about career progression are the following:
- Users compare their skills with other industry professionals.
- They look up the skills required for a job and try to learn them.
- They want to learn new skills and keep their career moving but find it hard to know what new skill should they learn.
I used this information to come up with two user personas that best represented the users who are most concerned about their skills and career progression.
Problem
From the research, following problem areas become evident,
- Although LinkedIn has identified skills as one of the important nodes in the economic graph, the current platform doesn’t provide any workflow or service to actively manage one’s skillsets.
- Despite having a shared vision and purpose, LinkedIn and Lynda.com are operating as two independent services and haven’t completed their integration.
Product Proposal and Prototype
Following the user personas, I could come up with a prioritized feature list, and they are,
- An ability to search for a skill, know it’s relevance and start learning it.
2. An ability to compare skills with other professionals.
3. And making skills an integral part of the job search process.
During this project, I found out that LinkedIn has already started creating independent pages for each of the skills and they can be seen in these pages: Product Management, Python, Django,etc.
I incorporated these pages into my prototype design and have created my prototype. Following is a short video, which shows how all these features are tied together.
Here’s a link to the prototype I created using Proto.io, I hope you try it out.
Metrics
Since this is a new feature added to a well established product, HEART framework guides us to come up with the list of metrics which can be used to measure the success of this feature.
Future Roadmap
Going forward, some of the things that can help evolve this feature are,
- Content curation, skills tagging: Based on the usage, user acceptance, frequently searched skills, the content on Lynda.com could be curated. Every new video that’s added to Lynda.com platform could be tagged to a skill that one would acquire.
- Skills gradation: Every video on Lynda.com is classified as either beginner, intermediate or Advanced, similar skills gradation could be adopted to the current LinkedIn skills listing.
- Skills recommendation: An ability to recommend a skill/course to a peer could be added.
In short, LinkedIn is definitely moving in the right direction. As they continue building the economic graph, I hope they make the process of discovering relevant skills and managing one’s career progression easier.
Update
On September 22nd LinkedIn came up with their new product called LinkedIn Learning, an online learning platform. With this product they have effectively started the integration of Lynda.com and LinkedIn. The rationale behind this product is similar to what I have discussed in this post. Some of the ideas I’ve discussed here like Skills tagging and skill recommendation have also been implemented with this new product.
Conclusion
I need to thank a lot of people who have helped me throughout this project. Greg Crescimanno for his guidance and feedback, Swapnaja More, Jesus Salcedo, Shruthi Desai, Shwetha, Sandeep Kunapareddy, Sandeep Mohan, Harsha, Pooja, Easwaran and my other friends for hearing my idea out and giving their honest opinion and suggestions. Also thanks to all the 76 people who took time to take my user survey. Thanks to Jason Travis for generously sharing his persona photos for this project and my roommate Sushruth, who helped me with Adobe Photoshop.
I would love to hear your opinion, feedback and suggestions.
