The pandemic has been and continues to be tough on all of us. But, LinkedIn is doing its part to help alleviate the burden by allowing users to achieve career advancement while navigating the pandemic.

Through the LinkedIn Learning Pathfinder or Career Pathfinder, LinkedIn is empowering users to develop the skills they need to take the next step in their professional journey.

Pathfinder is a self-paced program that begins with one simple question designed to help you set a professional goal for the next six months.

Goals inside LinkedIn’s Career Pathfinder

You can choose to focus on one of the following 8 goals inside the “Career Pathfinder”

• Cultivate a work-life balance
• Grow and advance in current role
• Grow as a leader
• Get a new job
• Get a promotion
• Get a new role at my company
• Be a better ally
• Master hybrid work

Once you have picked your goal, you get to meet the mentors and experts that will take you through the program.

And, then you can go through your learning path.

The LinkedIn Learning Pathfinder could not have come at a better time. Thanks to LinkedIn, many professionals that saw their careers stalled by the pandemic can finally get going again.

Even if your career was not adversely affected by the pandemic, there is still plenty to gain by going through the learning paths offered.

LinkedIn designed the Learning Pathfinder to be an interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style experience based on the top things professionals are looking to achieve.

The program is also a way for LinkedIn to accelerate the move toward a skills-first approach to hiring and talent development. LinkedIn believes that this will lead to more roles being filled based on skills and abilities and not only degrees and past job titles.

The belief has some merit to it. Last year over 40% of recruiters on LinkedIn used skills data to fill open roles for 2022. That is a significant 20% increase from the year before last, and the numbers suggest these recruiters are 60% more likely to find fitting candidates than those that do not look at skills in their hiring process.

The future of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not nearly as popular as other social media marketing platforms, but its usefulness for Millenials looking to advance their careers is undoubted. Users between 18 and 34 make up 80% of all LinkedIn users, and there are no outright alternatives for young individuals that want to talk business.

The priority, then, for LinkedIn is to continue to develop new ways for these young professionals to benefit and advance from being on the platform.

The Career Pathfinder represents the latest effort from LinkedIn to increase its appeal as a networking platform for the next generation of professionals.

The pathfinder is an excellent way for LinkedIn to increase in-app utility. Unlike other social media platforms, where users spend their time mindlessly scrolling, LinkedIn users can now spend their time on the platform upskilling and preparing themselves for roles they want to take up in the future.

LinkedIn also benefits from having users promote and advance their career prospects through LinkedIn accredited programs.

The shift to a skills-focused platform has been a success, and LinkedIn saw over 286 million skills added in the previous year. That number will surely go up as LinkedIn makes it even easier for users to obtain the skills they need to achieve their career goals.

LinkedIn also plans to improve the ability of users to highlight skills by enabling them to add context on how they developed the skills they have displayed on their profiles.

The improvement which LinkedIn expects to deploy soon would allow users to combine their skills, experience, and certifications so they better showcase their capabilities.

“For example, you’ll soon be able to say you have five years of Python experience based on your last role or you have a year of Design Thinking experience through an internship – signalling to companies even more that you have the skills to do the job.”

LinkedIn believes this update will help them better match users to job opportunities on the platform. It will also increase the relevance of results returned when users search for jobs based on their skills.

Another way LinkedIn is bolstering its usefulness to users in talent development is through its investment in the skill-building platform, LinkedIn Learning Hub.

Once it is operating to its full potential, the Learning Hub will help users identify the critical skills they need to succeed in their company and show them the role-specific content they need to gain those skills. It will also make it easier for them to see the internal job opportunities based on their career goals.

To accelerate progress on the LinkedIn Learning Hub, LinkedIn has enlisted help from Paddle HR, creators of one of the first career mobility platforms in the world.

Paddle HR specializes in helping people understand their in-house career possibilities making it easier for them to move into new roles and realize their fullest potential where they work.

The expertise Paddle HR brings will help LinkedIn create a much-needed and timely resource for users. Here is what the CEO of Paddle HR had to say:

“This transition could not be happening at a more opportune time. Following two years of disrupted work, new routines, and “the Great Reshuffle,” employees are reconsidering their careers more now than at any other point in our generation. People are asking themselves: what do I want to do, what do I know how to do and how can I bridge the gap between the two?”

It is exciting times over at LinkedIn as the platform continues to innovate and blaze its trail as the world’s largest business-focused social media platform.

It might be hard to get excited about work, but if anyone’s going to do it, LinkedIn is going all-out to make sure it’ll be them.