According to the Department for Work and Pensions, the government is bringing LinkedIn into its labour market planning in a bid to sharpen careers advice and hiring insight. Under the partnership, anonymised findings drawn from LinkedIn's 40 million UK accounts will be shared with Skills England, with the information expected to feed into the planned Jobs and Careers Service. That matters beyond Whitehall. For employers, the value is a better read on where shortages are building and which skills are becoming harder to find. For workers, the pitch is simpler: clearer guidance on where the jobs are, what skills matter and how people actually move from one role to another.

The policy rests on a simple idea: the 'job for life' is fading, and public services need to catch up. The government cites Funding Circle's estimate that the average worker will hold seven jobs over a lifetime, while LinkedIn says people entering work now are on pace to hold twice as many jobs as those who started 15 years ago. For the labour market, that shift changes what useful careers advice looks like. It is no longer enough to list vacancies and training courses. Workers increasingly need to see the stepping-stone roles between where they are now and where demand is growing, especially if they want to switch sector rather than climb a single ladder.

Skills England's annual report says priority sectors will need another 1.8 million workers by 2035. That is the commercial case for this project. If the state can spot where local job adverts are outpacing local skills supply, colleges, training providers and employers have a better chance of responding before shortages become a brake on growth. This could be particularly useful for smaller firms, which often feel skills shortages first but have less room to absorb them. Better data should, in theory, help an engineering business in the Midlands or a care provider in the North East see whether the problem is pay, training, geography or simply too narrow a view of who could do the job.

The most practical part of the plan is the attempt to map how people move between jobs. The Department for Work and Pensions wants to use LinkedIn's anonymised data to understand which career switches happen in the real world, not just which ones look neat on paper. That could encourage employers to recruit for adjacent skills instead of insisting on a perfect match. In plain terms, a logistics employer might look beyond candidates with a standard warehouse background and consider people from retail operations or field service roles. A digital employer struggling to hire junior analysts may be able to target applicants coming from customer support or back-office administration if the skills overlap is clear enough.

The government is also framing the partnership as part of its wider employment reform agenda. Ministers say it sits alongside the creation of the new Jobs and Careers Service and a £2.5 billion package intended to give every young person the chance to 'earn or learn'. Pat McFadden's message is that younger workers are less likely to stay in one career for decades, so advice has to be built around movement rather than permanence. That is a sensible reading of the market. Young people do not just need a first job; they need a clearer sense of what comes next, what retraining might involve and which sectors offer a realistic route to better pay. If this data helps local advisers give that answer with more confidence, it would be a genuine upgrade.

There is, though, a limit to what data alone can do. LinkedIn's 40 million UK accounts include students, retirees and people who identify the UK as their professional home, so it is a broad signal rather than a clean measure of the active workforce. That does not make the information useless, but it does mean policymakers will need to combine it with vacancy data, pay data and local employer feedback. Privacy is also a key part of the pitch. The government says no individual-level member data will be handed to the Department for Work and Pensions, with anonymised findings produced inside LinkedIn's existing systems before being shared with Skills England. For a project like this, public trust will depend on that distinction being kept clear.

Last week's meeting between Pat McFadden and LinkedIn's Blake Lawit gives the tie-up some political weight, but the hard part comes next. Skills England is leading the early phase on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions, and the real test will be whether this work changes decisions on training, recruitment and local support rather than simply producing better dashboards. For employers, the partnership is worth watching because it suggests the government wants a more evidence-led approach to shortages and workforce mobility. For workers, especially younger jobseekers, the promise is more tailored advice on how to move into sectors that are actually hiring. If that promise is met, this looks useful. If not, it risks becoming another well-intentioned data project with little effect at the sharp end of the jobs market.