Apply to replace me as LinkedIn's Workforce Development and Government Partnership Lead
This is one of the hardest articles I’ve had to write. I’m splitting it in into 3 parts:
- this first, posting my current job,
- the second, describing some of what’s coming next for me, and
- the third (or more), once I’ve had some time to digest the past decade of employment at (and identification with) LinkedIn, summarizing its lessons.
Building LinkedIn’s workforce development and public private partnership capability is the most important work I’ve done short of creating the human baby Elina and I are anticipating in August.
I’m incredibly proud of this work’s impact and grateful for the unparalleled support I’ve received from LinkedIn and I want to find the perfect successor to continue this momentum.
So here’s a few words on the most formative role of my career:
In short, my job involves innovating and building citizen-facing public private partnerships for LinkedIn Talent Solutions (LTS). LTS is the part of LinkedIn’s sales organization that sells our hiring, recruiting, job and company promotion, labour market information and online learning software, insights and content. The rest of LTS’ salespeople focus on helping an organization to hire or train their own employees.
I build partnerships where governments or non-profits buy these software-as-a-service products, usually at substantial scale, to support jobseekers and workforce development organizations. Working as on overlay on a few dozen sales representatives on our North American government and nonprofit teams, I build ecosystems in which their clients use LTS to support folks outside their organizations. Americans typically describe these workforce development organizations as workforce boards and Departments of Labor while in Canada they would range from employment service organizations and their associations and service managers, to Ministries of Labour. More recently we’ve begun exploring economic development public private partnerships supporting companies or regions with hiring and placement as well.
This document summarizes the work of this role to date. It includes many case studies of the public private partnerships I lead in my current capacity working with our government and non-profit teams. The higher education examples refer to a previous role on that team and the writing spans both periods as well as work outside of LinkedIn.
Another substantial portion of my role has been developing Business Development, channel or sales partnerships for LinkedIn’s government team. The goal here is to partner with LinkedIn’s BD team to negotiate partnerships with other companies that already sell into government, primarily in support of internal human capital functions, so we can sell LTS together into these teams.
Finally, as you’ll see from the formal job posting (please DM me if interested before applying), the role is explicitly entrepreneurial, flexible and driven by creativity. This innovation is bounded by LinkedIn’s current product offerings and sales and policy organizations and their processes. It was the ideal role to execute on the plan I hatched 10 years ago to apply my entrepreneurial connecting nature born out of a startup I co-founded, to navigating the inside of a 18K (LinkedIn) and 220K (Microsoft) employee company. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn and LinkedIn’s of Lynda.com increased the reach and products at my disposal as I partnered closely with Microsoft’s policy team, like LinkedIn’s, and LinkedIn Learning remains a pillar of this work.
One last word on LinkedIn as a whole. Not only does it run the most trusted major social network, the most important job exchange, perhaps the greatest labour market information database, and amongst the most effective SAAS sales organizations, but it also has remained open to product and process innovation. This allowed me to grow movements like the following in collaboration with our Product, BD, Policy, Marketing, and many other teams:
- skills-based-hiring and -learning,
- digital ID and verifiable credentials
- online and hybrid learning
- microcredentials, work-integrated- and work-based-learning
- higher education, workforce development and economic development systems reform and integration.
I’d be grateful for as many re-shares on this post as possible as whomever takes over from me will in many ways determine the future of workforce development at LinkedIn.
And one final thank you to you all, and particularly my colleagues, for turning these wonky, altruistic and unorthodox dreams into realities.