LinkedIn’s Quest to Get a Job for Everyone on Earth, Research Paper Example

Over the past quarter-century Knowledge Management (KM) has become a significant and influential discipline and set of practices.  In the era of the Internet and globalization, the speed and precision with which organizations can disseminate and utilize information can mean the difference between success and failure in a hyper-competitive environment. Although the KM sphere encompasses a broad set of factors, the effective use of knowledge in any given organization can be equally broad or can be more specifically and narrowly-targeted. In the article “The Next Big Thing You Missed: LinkedIn’s Quest to Get a Job for Everyone on Earth,” author Marcus Wholsen reports on the ways LinkedIn is strategizing its growth in accordance with fundamental principles of KM.

According to the article, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has a vision of a future in which every worker on the planet (and the companies and organizations for whom they work) all have LinkedIn profiles. Speaking at the recent 2014 Techonomy Conference, Weiner stated, “we are in the process of asking ourselves what it would take…to create economic opportunity for the 3 billion people in the global workforce.”  Weiner continues, “what we ultimately want to do…is digitally map the global economy.” Weiner goes on to explain how LinkedIn is largely designed to provide a platform for “knowledge workers,” or the hundreds of millions of people who work at computers all day, harnessing, storing, disseminating, and using information and knowledge.

Wholsen identifies the concept of “flow” in terms of how information and knowledge move through organizations to (hopefully) be harnessed effectively. The social-networking capabilities and functions of a platform such as LinkedIn serve to allow information to be shared on a wide basis, while at the same time giving the LinkedIn organization the opportunity to see how such information is shared and use that knowledge effectively across the organizational structure.

Weiner identifies the speed with which demand for different skills and knowledge sets evolves according to shifting economic conditions as his company’s greatest challenge. This highlights the difficulties an organization like LinkedIn faces by position itself as a network for such vast amounts of constantly-shifting information. In this context, his and his company’s central task is, for all practical purposes, centered on KM. According to Weiner, “the rate of innovation is exceeding our ability to train people to take advantage of the opportunities those innovations create. It’s not years anymore. It’s months. It’s weeks.” LinkedIn’s CEO and staff must disseminate information quickly both vertically and horizontally within the organization simply to stay abreast of these changes and innovations.

In essence, Weiner stakes out a position that LinkedIn itself should be (and, he hopes, will be) a KM system that can be tapped into by any organization or individual in the world. In this vision, companies can rapidly recruit needed workers from anywhere in the world, schools can deploy “just-in-time curriculums” that are responsive to shifting economic conditions, and individuals can connect with information and opportunities on a global scale. In the Internet age, organizations such as LinkedIn are often staking out entirely new territory, and LinkedIn has few serious competitors that operate as such a large-scale social networking site for businesses (Wagner, 2013). There are, however, a number of platforms that offer similar networking capabilities that are targeted to specific industries or markets (Wagner). LinkedIn must continue to utilize its KM capacities effectively and responsively in order to maintain its position as the leading platform of its type. What this article makes clear is that organizations are eager to identify and utilize knowledge effectively and responsively, and that KM is an inextricably linked to organizational success in the global economic system. LinkedIn’s strategic vision serves as an example of just how integral KM has become.

References

Wagner, K. (2013). Meet 3 serious LinkedIn imitators. Fortune. Retrieved 4 February 2015, from http://fortune.com/2013/08/01/meet-3-serious-linkedin-imitators/

Wohlsen, M. (2014). The Next Big Thing You Missed: LinkedIn’s Quest to Get a Job for Everyone on Earth | Wired. Wired. Retrieved 1 February 2015, from http://www.wired.com/2014/11/next-big-thing-missed-linkedins-quest-get-job-everyone-earth/