LinkedIn’s looking to help people deal with the rise of generative AI, by adding new ways to assist in internal career advancement, and finding new roles within the organizations that they already work for.

First off, LinkedIn’s launching “Next Role Explorer”, which will provide a visualization of potential next roles to employees inside their company, based on their career goals.

As you can see in this example, Next Role Explorer will show employees how they can progress their career into their desired role, based on other staff who’ve followed similar job journeys. It’ll also highlight the skills you have and need to make the switch.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“Say an employee is a data analyst, but wants to transition into a different area of the company. We'll recommend new roles based on people who have made a similar job change and provide a personalized curriculum of content to start learning hard and soft skills relevant to the job. Or, if someone wants to be promoted in their current role, we can help by recommending the skills needed to advance to the next stage.”

This is a key area where LinkedIn has the potential to provide real career value, as it’s the only platform that has a full track of career progressions, and is therefore the only app that’s able to showcase how different people have changed roles over time.

LinkedIn’s actually been working on variations of this for years, but has seemingly never been able to get it right, on a broader scale at least.

Back in 2014, journalist Kurt Wagner wrote about how LinkedIn showed him his likely career path, based on other people with similar backgrounds in the app. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but it was an interesting experiment to show how LinkedIn can utilize its troves of career data to help people better understand their potential career paths.

LinkedIn has also tried to show college students their likely career progression with its “LinkedIn University Finder” element, which it retired several years back.

I assume both of these activations weren’t entirely accurate for most people, which is why they didn’t stick around, but maybe this more confined version of the same, utilizing more specific insights among colleagues, will prove more directly valuable.

Though, of course, those results will be skewed if random people have tagged themselves as employees of your company. For example, Social Media Today has over 460 employees listed on LinkedIn. Which is, um, not close to accurate, but we can’t remove them as employees because LinkedIn doesn’t offer that functionality.

Seems like that could inhibit the accuracy of this career progression data.

In addition to this, LinkedIn’s also adding a new way for employees to share their interest in internal roles, which will enable them to get alerts for new internal job openings, and get guidance from LinkedIn Learning as to the skills that they’ll need for their desired role.

With many people looking at a career change, given the rise of generative AI, and the projected impacts that these tools can have on various markets, these new options could help to expand opportunities, and keep knowledgeable people within organizations.

On that front, LinkedIn’s also making 250 generative AI based courses available for free through to April 5th, as another means to help people evolve their careers.

“Topics span across industries, roles and levels, from building GAI-literacy to making GAI-powered business investments.”

It’s difficult to predict the full disruption that AI tools will cause, but many people are now re-assessing their future opportunities, and looking at other options.

These new tools will provide more guidance in this respect.