By Jenn Steinfeld
The future of work is changing. Technology is creating new opportunities but it’s also removing traditional employment in many communities. To help municipalities respond to this shifting change, the National League of Cities and LinkedIn are teaming up to provide cohorts of member cities with insights into career and entrepreneurship trends in their communities.
NLC’s Center for City Solutions and LinkedIn will collaborate on two topics: Career Pathways, Entrepreneurship, and High Growth Firms. NLC and LinkedIn worked together to identify and give cohort cities access to data and insights from LinkedIn through a series of webinars. These insights include a look at emerging (and declining) jobs that help cities structure workforce training to match growing employer needs and a snapshot of entrepreneur successes and the factors that help cities support them.
This partnership allows cities to access LinkedIn’s data about careers and local business growth, and insight to help cities address their unique workforce challenges and opportunities.
“We are excited to leverage all of the data points from our Economic Graph – more than 675 million members, 36 thousand skills, 50 million companies, 20 million open jobs, and 90 thousand schools updating in real-time – to support solutions for workforce development challenges,” said Nicole Isaac, Senior Director of North America Policy for LinkedIn.
“Through utilizing traditional and non-traditional forms of aggregated insights, we are able to paint an especially rich picture of the fastest-changing areas of the workforce. We are excited to be able to share these unique, granular insights with our partner cities, and help them to build workforce development programs tailored to the needs of their constituents and employers.”
This growing partnership with LinkedIn will help local stakeholders and municipalities collaborate to find meaningful, actionable, and sustainable solutions for their communities. This valuable data helps local leaders make informed decisions about how to focus their resources on talent pipelines and workforce development.
“Our partnership with LinkedIn is an opportunity for us to provide key data to help cities, towns, and villages strengthen policy-making and deepen partnerships with local stakeholders,” said Clarence E. Anthony, CEO and executive director of the National League of Cities. “Local leaders, Chambers of Commerce, higher education partners, and other civic leaders will be able to use local data to craft training programs and guide local investments to help promote broad-based equitable economic growth.”
Municipalities were selected based on their engagement with NLC’s Center for City Solutions and their interest in the topic areas. Albuquerque, Baltimore, Akron, Tulsa, Knoxville, and Austin were part of the Entrepreneurship and High Growth Firms cohort, while Jacksonville, Nashville, Tempe, and Houston were in the Career Pathways cohort.
“We are excited to collaborate with NLC and LinkedIn to obtain current data on Houston’s high-demand local workforce needs to share with our Hire Houston Youth partners and participants,” said Juliet K. Stipeche, Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Director of Education for the City of Houston. “This differentiated-data, specified for our unique community, guides critical decisions to empower our diverse population with timely information and supports our efforts to design equitable programs for Houston’s youth that adequately addresses their needs and the city’s existent workforce gaps.”
As the relationship between LinkedIn and NLC continues to grow, we hope to offer more data-driven insights to member cities to help them identify trends and make informed choices about using local resources.
Jenn Steinfeld is the director of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development for the National League of Cities, supporting municipalities to develop plans for inclusive, equitable, and resilient local economies. She recently joined NLC from the City of Providence, where she served as the director of Strategic Partnerships and Economic Opportunity.