If you were to join LinkedIn today, what feature would you build that can enhance the worldwide workforce?

Note: I feel I went fairly tangential in the following thread, but I found it interesting nonetheless. 

I'd still like people's opinion on the answer and presentation

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Enhancing the worldwide workforce is a mammoth undertaking. To understand the problem better, I’d ask the following questions to help chalk out the goals and scope of the problem.

·       Are there broader firm, industry, or social goals that this ask is aligned to?

·       Could you further elaborate on what you mean when you say enhance the worldwide workforce?

o   Do we want to help the current users get better?

o   How is the goal of this feature different from existing LinkedIn features such as LinkedIn learning?

o   Do we want to funnel in a larger set more qualified set of users, thus enhancing the overall workforce on the platform?

o   Are we looking to build any industry-specific solutions such as hackathons for professionals in software engineering, or exam prep for users from the financial services?

·       Is there a preference and priority order on where the feature will be launched first?

Based on the questions above, and answers that I thought I might have got, I have understood the problem as the below:

Build a new feature whose functionality doesn’t overlap with an existing feature. It is a global reach and has no platform restrictions.

We are looking to help people get more out of their time on LinkedIn.

The feature must be generic and extendible to all users, not specific industries.

When I think of how LinkedIn can enhance the workforce, there are three approaches that come to mind

Quality of content

Quality of engagement

Tools made available to its users

LinkedIn is an established leader in professional networking and has a strong brand image. It needs to lean on this image, for all things professional.

While it is the go-to platform for people when they are looking to expand their network, looking for new work, or looking to hire talent, consumption of content is an underutilized area for the platform.

Engagement on LinkedIn is most often network building, and reactions on the newsfeed, the opportunity to build more meaningful connections is also a potential winner.

LinkedIn’s biggest strength is its userbase and tapping into this userbase to achieve the highest quality content and engagement will go a long way in enhancing the worldwide workforce.

To start working on the above goals, I would segment LinkedIn’s userbase as:

New professionals – who are still learning the trades they have chosen to be in. Whose goal for enhancement would be to absorb as much knowledge as is available on the platform.

Seasoned professionals – who have been in the industry with some success and are looking to now grow their network, their reach, and their brand.

Industry experts – The other end of the spectrum from new professionals, this is the set of users who are industry leaders from whom everyone on the platform can learn.

Usecases:

The user wants to learn more about an industry and is overwhelmed by the number of opinions and barrage of information that exists, they want a distilled set of articles, biographies, and stories to read.

User has very specific questions about an industry, working style and wants guidance, but not the kind of questions they wouldn’t post on an open forum but would like to connect one on one with folks

Users want access to industry leaders for insights

The user wants to monitor his own growth

Solution:

LinkedIn Digest: this is a space on the platform where certain articles, series, stories are made available to the entire userbase. These stories are in-depth well-written articles, proofread and vetted by LinkedIn editors, published by LinkedIn separately. These articles are a periodic collection and span many industries. To users, they are enlightening reads. To writers, being published in this section is a badge of honor, and an exponential increase in reach from their own network to all LinkedIn users.
As a company, LinkedIn can create a content developers’ program for people who are interested in writing these articles.
From a product point, it is a simple feature that is available on LinkedIn, independent of the newsfeed, where users can peruse quality content

Mentorship: One of the problems that the internet has been unable to solve very well so far is that of building very meaningful connections. Building a mentorship feature will enable LinkedIn to increase the quality of engagement for all user categories. Mentorship is an effective tool for growth for both the mentee who benefits from the mentor’s expertise and the mentor who learns to be empathetic and build on their leadership skills.

LinkedIn firesides: Leaning in and building on the current global trends of virtual meetings and global offices, Linkedin can create a feature for people to host fireside chats and interviews for the benefit of their users. These interviews can be exclusive content available only on LinkedIn and people will learn from insights provided by industry experts. These events can be moderated and have some level of audience participation to increase levels of engagement.

I have picked the above solutions as ones that appeal to the overall growth of users and are not targeted to industries. These features are external to the already existent features such as LinkedIn learning where users can pick up specific skills, or skill badges that encourage people to learn by testing their knowledge.

The Priority order here is determined by the complexity of the solutions

Metrics to measure the success of the features:

LinkedIn Digest:

Daily active users who have spent at least a threshold amount of time reading the articles.

Increased engagement on articles post-publication in the digest from standalone entries

Mentorship:

The number of mentorship connections that were created.

The ratio of activity in this feature to overall platform engagement

Firesides

Attendance, and engagement per fireside