Public sector

What anonymized data taught me about B2B sales... and reliance on the private sector for statistical info

The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will draw on 40 million UK LinkedIn accounts to get a better understanding of local job markets.

DWP said it plans to use anonymized data to help it find trends such as mismatches between local job ads and the skills possessed by local people.

The department won't scrape the Microsoft-owned social network, instead relying on Redmond to analyze data and pass its findings to Skills England, a DWP agency whose officials are already working on the project.

"This partnership with LinkedIn will give us a clearer understanding of the jobs market – what employers need, where opportunities are, and how people are building their careers, in order to boost economic growth," DWP minister Pat McFadden said in a canned statement. He added that more detailed insights into local workforces could particularly help young people.

Skills England intends to use LinkedIn data to investigate how people move between jobs to help them develop new career options and support businesses in widening their recruitment nets.

LinkedIn has nearly four million more UK-registered accounts than the 36.2 million adults who were working or looking for work in the first quarter of this year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). However, the service is open to students and retirees, so perhaps that accounts for the discrepancy. The Reg knows some users have more than one account on the site as well.

The UK government increasingly draws on commercial data to supplement its official statistics. For example, the ONS publishes "real-time indicators" that include monthly data on new online job adverts, based on Textkernel scraping information from 90,000 job board and recruitment pages. The ONS has suffered from falling response rates for official data-gathering exercises such as its Labour Force Survey, making commercial sources more attractive.

A recent report from Germany-based digital policy group Interface
suggests that other arms of government are also taking advantage of commercial data, with Hungary's intelligence services using location data gathered for mobile advertising and equivalent organizations in other countries likely to be doing similar. ®