Hi everyone! I’m Neil Basu. I graduated from the OII with an MSc. in Social Science of the Internet in 2012. I currently work as a Senior Manager for LinkedIn’s Central Market Research, Operations & Product Marketing team.

Right now, I am one of many employees who are trying to tackle an amorphous, far-reaching problem for LinkedIn. As a professional networking, learning & jobs platform, LinkedIn’s site engagement is up since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, but its members are hungering even more for timely and relevant information about the job market, given the fog of uncertainty that currently represents our economic future. As a company, LinkedIn is expected to assume a thought leader’s role on how workers are doing right now and what economic recovery could look like.

With the help of our News, Communications, and Data Science teams, I have launched a global research survey measuring the labour force’s confidence by asking questions about jobs, personal finances, career, and employer outlook. All of these attributes are summarized through a Workforce Confidence Index. As the program’s lead, my ambition is to track key segments that workers identify with (age group, region, industry or job function, company size, etc.) and report out how the collective mood & expectations are tracking over time. We also aspire to partner with policymakers, employers, and other institutions to amplify & transform this data into initiatives that actually accelerate the recovery effort.

We stood this up in a hurry 3 months ago, and have now delivered three rounds of insights directly to members in the US, UK, Canada, India & Australia. We intend to expand to 7 more countries in the next month, and begin engaging policymakers and employers soon after that. You can see the latest reporting by following the #WorkforceConfidenceIndex hashtag on Linkedin. I’m happy to hear any thoughts, questions, ideas, or other feedback from this esteemed community!