LinkedIn is looking to help more people re-skill and upskill as we move beyond the pandemic, with a new application called ‘LinkedIn Learning Pathfinder’, which takes you through a basic Q & A process to then help you find a dedicated LinkedIn Learning education pathway for your professional development.

The new process, which you can try for yourself here, begins by asking for your name and what you want to achieve, professionally, over the next 6 months.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“[Learning Pathfinder is] an interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style experience based on the top things professionals are looking to achieve - with options like cultivating work-life balance, finding a new job or getting a promotion. LinkedIn is also offering these 100+ LinkedIn Learning courses free through April.”

Once you’ve gone through the process, Pathfinder will outline your learning pathway, first via an overview of your educators and the key subjects of focus in the course.

You can then tap through to LinkedIn Learning to begin your path.

It’s a simple way to get more users engaged with upskilling and developing for new roles, and with LinkedIn also looking to highlight your skills through its own accreditation, it could be a good way to ensure that the competencies you have listed on your profile match the requirements of the roles that you’re looking to apply for in the app.

LinkedIn also says that employers are increasingly relying on its professional skills data to assess potential candidates:

“40% of hirers on LinkedIn are relying on skills to fill open roles (up 20% year over year), and hirers relying on skills data are 60% are more likely to make a hire when vetting candidates for their skills alone.”

LinkedIn’s always working to find new ways to best utilize its unmatched professional dataset, with access to the largest collection of career and education insights on the planet. LinkedIn’s tried various ways to highlight skills and education opportunities, both to university students and career professionals, and with its enhanced connection to LinkedIn Learning, there’s now more opportunity than ever for the platform to merge these two elements, and facilitate more connection to people’s dream roles.

As such, this is an interesting initiative – though it probably doesn’t dig into the full depth of data that LinkedIn could provide in this respect.

For example, back in 2014, LinkedIn developed a process that could map your likely career path and opportunities, based on similar user profiles and their progressions over time - which, given LinkedIn’s 800 million-plus member dataset would be a fairly strong indicator of likely career progression. But it’s never been released, and again, while LinkedIn has tried different tools on this front, there does seem like even more potential there, with the opportunity to more specifically map out the best opportunities for each user, and the best candidates for each employer.

It is, of course, a complex area of machine learning, and predicting career progressions probably won’t ever be an exact science given the different circumstances that lead people into their roles. But there could, and should be ways to align job satisfaction with career progression, which could open up new opportunities for LinkedIn to provide more valuable insight in this respect.

Till then, we’ll have to settle for professional development opportunities like this, which are valuable in their own right.

You can check out LinkedIn’s ‘Learning Pathfinder’ process here.