World Bank Group-LinkedIn Data Insights : Jobs, Skills and Migration Trends Methodology and Validation Results

The World Bank Group-LinkedIn partnership pilots the use of private company data for generating insights on development trends. This partnership is a three-year effort between the WBG and LinkedIn to investigate the extent to which LinkedIn's data can inform policy. The first phase of the partnership evaluates LinkedIn data covering 100 countries with at least 100,000 LinkedIn members, distributed across 148 industries and 50,000 skills categories. The second and third phase focus on automating and scaling insights, and expanding joint research. This methodology report describes the construction and validation of metrics on skills, industry employment, and talent migration in over 100 countries. This report has three objectives: (1) document the characteristics and coverage of LinkedIn data; (2) report the methods used to develop new metrics; and (3) showcase examples of policy questions that can be answered with this non-traditional data. Because this is the first time that LinkedIn has shared a non-traditional dataset with a third-party organization globally as a public good (strictly unremunerated), it is important that we make these methodology and validation results available so that researchers and policy-makers can build on this initial effort by the WBG and LinkedIn.