LinkedIn offers a new way to look at employment: The Economist
Interesting. A potential game-changer for labor and economic research.
….. Researchers already mine the internet for hints about disease outbreaks, the national mood or inflation. LinkedIn thinks its data can do the same for the job market. It has more than 150m members worldwide, 60m of them in America. That should be enough to draw accurate inferences about the entire American labour force.
At the request of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it calculated which industries and job titles were experiencing the biggest gains and losses. Scott Nicholson, a “data scientist” for the firm, says LinkedIn can potentially track such changes in real time, rather than the weeks or months government surveys take. It can also follow occupations and industries, such as e-learning, that don’t have their own category in government tallies. It can trace shifts between regions, sectors and occupations. Are people quitting law firms to become law professors, moving from Arizona to North Dakota, or what?
The firm hopes to be able to track the nation’s evolving skills base…..
