UK.gov links up with LinkedIn for jobs market intel from 40M accounts

The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will draw on 40 million UK LinkedIn accounts to get a better understanding of local job markets. DWP said it plans to use anonymized data to help it find trends such as mismatches between local job ads and the skills possessed by local people. The department won't scrape the …

[elsergiovolador]

Explorers

Forty million accounts handed over and the operative word throughout is "explore". The DWP "will explore how this data can be used" and "explore a number of possibilities". Translation: nobody has decided what this is for, but the deal is signed regardless. Procurement first, purpose later. Familiar.

The privacy assurance rests entirely on the word "anonymised", deployed four times and defined precisely nowhere. Anyone who has glanced at the re-identification literature knows employment history is about as anonymous as a fingerprint. Job title, employer, sector, tenure, rough location: stitch three of those together and you have a named individual, particularly in any role thinner than "data analyst, London". "Anonymised findings shared with Skills England" tells you nothing about the granularity of those findings, which is the only thing that matters.

Then there is consent, which appears in the statement zero times. Forty million people built LinkedIn profiles to find work, not to be enrolled into a government labour-market modelling exercise. "No individual-level member data will be shared with DWP" is doing a great deal of load-bearing work, given the analysis happens inside Microsoft's systems before the findings are passed on. The members furnishing the raw material have been asked nothing.

One detail rewards a second look. The "seven jobs in a lifetime" figure in the statement is attributed not to the Office for National Statistics, nor to any body whose remit is actually measuring how the nation works, but to Funding Circle. One wonders whether anyone in the drafting process paused over the choice, or whether the bar for evidence in a 40-million-account data partnership is simply whichever statistic was nearest to hand.

The stated goal, mapping "how people move between jobs" to "widen career options", is the giveaway. The framing assumes the state should be steering the workforce toward "priority sectors" rather than observing a market and getting out of the way. We have moved from measuring the population to managing it, and the consultation with the population in question ran to precisely no questions asked.

Perhaps Skills England could "explore" publishing the data-sharing agreement, the granularity thresholds, and the legal basis under which 40 million people's professional histories became a public-sector input. Or perhaps that too remains a possibility for the future.

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Explorers

"..observing a market and getting out of the way.."

Is that the market that's offshored millions of jobs? Or the same market that's, at best, going to turn engineers into AI babysitters and at worst put them out of work?

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Explorers

A fair challenge, but it assumes the offshoring happened by itself. It did not. The market you are describing has been shaped at every turn by the same hand now reaching for LinkedIn's data.

Take IR35. The rules bit on a supplier according to who owned it, not according to what the work looked like. A consultant placed on a client site by a large outsourcing firm is legitimate supply; the same person doing the same work for a company he wholly or partially owns becomes an "intermediary", its whole revenue taxed as his wage, on the sole ground that he holds the shares. The later reforms then made the client carry the liability for getting that status call wrong, so the safe response was simply to stop engaging owner-run suppliers at all. Blanket bans followed across banks and large employers, not because the work was abusive but because no procurement department wants to own someone else's tax risk. So the work moved to whoever had no ownership to declare, or abroad where the rules do not reach. Nothing was banned by statute. The terms were simply changed until owning the business doing the work was the most expensive and most hazardous way to buy the same labour, and the market did the obvious thing.

The quieter damage was to incentive. A professional with a stake in his own business upskills because the upside is his; absorb him into someone else's headcount and the upside accrues to that someone else's margin. Strip enough owners of viable terms and the most capable do not become contented employees, they emigrate, incorporate offshore, or simply stop pushing. The result is brain drain by design, and it never shows up as a policy failure because the jobs technically still exist. They have just been hollowed out from the inside.

The immigration regime then greased the offshoring directly, which is the part people get backwards. The visa routes let outsourcing providers bring in their own staff to sit on a UK client site, exempt from the going-rate that local hiring would command, learn the function on the premises, and then anchor the rest of the team abroad once the knowledge has been transferred. Each cohort trained onshore becomes the bridgehead for moving more work offshore: the imported worker is not there to fill a genuine local gap but to absorb the process and carry it home. And because the imported labour arrives without the £50,000-odd of tuition debt a domestic graduate now shoulders, it can be priced below what a local engineer needs to earn merely to service a loan. That manufactured wage pressure is self-reinforcing. Hold graduate pay down across an entire profession and you ensure the next cohort earns just above a frozen repayment threshold, services the interest and never clears the principal, which makes the domestic career even less worth entering and hands the offshoring case its next argument. The state engineered the cost disadvantage and then pointed at it as justification.

Stack the rest of it. A planning regime that treats commercial space as a scarce luxury, so siting people locally is dear before a wage is paid. Energy among the most expensive in the developed world. A compliance burden that falls heaviest on exactly the small firms one would want growing. The market did not offshore these jobs of its own accord; it responded rationally to terms that made domestic labour costly, domestic premises scarce, imported labour cheap and domestic ownership legally radioactive. "Getting out of the way" was never tried.

As for AI turning engineers into babysitters: every generation gets handed a higher abstraction and told the craft is dead. The compiler was going to finish programmers; it multiplied them. That churn is worth taking seriously, but it is the ordinary life of the field. A government deciding it needs 40 million career histories to manage the outcome is another matter. One is progress. The other is the state appointing itself the babysitter.

[Random as if !]

Re: Explorers

You forgit about trump cancelling H1Bs and the salary for AI analyst in london at £70k.

So america gets their high skilked low cost, we get a person with a PHD working as a batista , as their student loan would bite at £70k.

Oh yes, its now the middle classes that will see this does not work , enjoy!

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Explorers

True, I was only scratching the surface, there are plenty more factors at work.

But on the £70k wage bit. The part that still gets missed is what IR35 did to bargaining power. The moment you remove a worker's ability to walk away and stand up his own shop, you have quietly converted him into captive labour. The exit option is what gave the individual any leverage at all; take it away and the salaried worker is left negotiating with both hands tied, because the credible threat of going independent has been legislated out from under him. Plenty cheered those reforms on the strength of the government's "fairness" framing, not realising they were voting away their own escape hatch. They built the cage and then walked into it.

The door only swings one way by design. A service business started by someone working or middle class, with no trust fund behind it, is close to dead on arrival, because it carries a compliance load and a client-side risk that the established players simply do not have. The client who would happily engage a large supplier will not touch the one or few-man firm, not because the work is worse but because the rules made that engagement hazardous. So the ladder is pulled up precisely for the people who most needed to climb it, and the whole mechanism sailed clean over the heads of the very class it captured.

[Bebu sa Ware]

LinkedIn ?

I can only imagine the quality of the data trawled from that nut house.

Money for jam for Microslop — mouldy jam at that.

[Electronics'R'Us]

Re: LinkedIn ?

I came here with the same thought.

This partnership with LinkedIn will give us a clearer understanding of the jobs market – what employers need, where opportunities are, and how people are building their careers, in order to boost economic growth.

Given that the majority of the jobs on LI are fake (clickbait for cheap recruiters to amass lots of CVs) this is going to be of as much use for the stated purpose as tits on a boar hog.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: LinkedIn ?

I'm sure the local council sanitation engineers (bin men) are users of LinkedIn. The supervisors may be used to posting uplifting stories about the latest trends in recycling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LinkedIn ?

LinkedIn is a slop, scam and monetisation filled cesspit. I can’t imagine a worse place for them to do this ‘research”.

[ecofeco]

GIGO!

Garbage in, garbage out.

[Dwarf]

Trust

At least we can trust the information on LinkedIn to be 100% accurate, so there is nothing to worry about.

I'm really pleased to see that virtually every profile is for someone who is the founder of some single person company, or some over inflated and completely meaningless title, or that they are the CTO or managing director etc.

Perhaps now is the time to go back to polluting the data set with the "Advanced Llama Trainer" skill and other such meaningless names. Lets see how the analytics copes with that and how the Government decide which jobs they want people to skill up for - because stats.

On the flip side, lets stop offshoring everything, so that there are actually jobs that people want and can mature into - just like it used to work before.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Trust

The sneer at the "founder of some single person company" tells you everything. Almost every company that now employs thousands was, at one humiliating point, one person with a registration number and more nerve than sense. The bloke you are mocking for calling himself a founder is doing the precise thing the country claims to want more of, and your first instinct is to laugh at the title rather than ask why so few others dare.

Because the alternative you are tacitly defending is the corporate berth, where a "real" job means renting your weekday existence to an organisation whose entire purpose is to extract more value from you than it returns, and to pay you precisely enough to keep turning up and not one penny toward an actual life. Decades of that arrangement have taught people that the salaried path leads to a flat they will never own and a pension that will not arrive, so a few of them have concluded they would rather bet on themselves. For their trouble they get sneered at on LinkedIn by people who mistake a job title for a class marker.

That is the bit worth naming. The disdain for the one-man founder is old British snobbery in a new costume: the settled conviction that taking your destiny into your own hands is a touch vulgar, that the right sort of person waits to be selected rather than declaring himself open for business. It is the worldview of someone who has never had to earn a pound he was not handed, picking over the profiles of people who manage it every month, and finding them gauche. We ask aloud why the country does not grow while saving our purest contempt for precisely the people trying to make it.

As for the founder being mostly hot air: some are, naturally. But a puffed-up title on a struggling one-man firm is a good deal more honest than the same grandiosity inside a large one, where it comes with a salary, a corner office and a great deal less risk. The man calling himself CEO of a company of one has at least put his own name on the line. That is nearer to deserving respect than a snigger, even if the thing never makes it. Especially then.

[Random as if !]

Re: Trust

Sorry linkein is shit , these founders are idiots on linkedin , see linkedinlunatics on reddit

[MrGreen]

Hunting for tax losses

It is more likely that the DWP are analysing who is economically inactive.

There are 3.6 million people between the age of 50 and 64 in the UK who are inactive, 25.6% of the total population for that age bracket.

Approximately 30.8% of economically inactive people list early retirement as their primary reason for not working. This translates to just over 1.1 million people who have chosen early retirement.

These are people who would have been on good salaries which means high tax payers. 65% are classified as professionals.

Direct tax losses are £16 billion but a comprehensive GOV.UK review updated in 2026 revealed that the broader state costs of working-age ill health and economic inactivity cost the state £212 billion per year (equivalent to roughly 7% of GDP).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hunting for tax losses

Your analysis only works if the jobs that the early retirees were doing disappeared when they retired. I retired at 55 and the company replaced me with someone of equivalent ability and experience and paid them a similar salary to what I was earning. They are paying about the same tax as I was and I'm paying tax on my pension income so the state is getting more tax than it did when I worked.

[andy the pessimist]

Re: Hunting for tax losses

The DWP may find non economically active people in that age range. What are they going to do, send you a letter, send the boys round?

[andy the pessimist]

Would this be another stick to beat the unemployed with?

Mass emails to companies and recruitment agencies.

DWP just counting the numbers even if the company is in a completely different industry.