Trends in automation and the digital reorganization of work pose challenges for those seeking to make strategic skilling and hiring decisions. Existing scholarship offers limited guidance for these decisions as it tends to model sectors of the knowledge economy as modules, rather than parts of a connected, adaptive system. This project will leverage unprecedented access to the complete LinkedIn dataset to identify mixtures of knowledge, skills, and relationships that maximize income and future potential for individual participants in the knowledge economy. Coupled with enterprise and regional data, the researchers will perform natural experiments to evaluate predictions about marginal skill development and optimal skill sourcing to yield a wealth of intellectual, technological, and commercial innovations that will have a direct and positive impact on society.
Principal Investigators: James Evans (Professor, Sociology), Eamon Duede (PhD Candidate, University of Chicago), Lingfei Wu (Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, University of Pittsburgh), Matthew Gee (PhD Candidate, University of Chicago)