LinkedIn completes a decade in India

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with 660+ million members globally, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in India, its fastest-growing market outside the US.

LinkedIn’s member base in India has seen a 20X growth in the past 10 years, from 3.4 million in November 2009 to 62 million members today. The member base has nearly doubled in the past four years, making it a leading market outside the US.

In November 2009, LinkedIn expanded its international presence by setting up its first office in India in Mumbai. Over the past decade, LinkedIn focused on driving a members-first approach, and worked towards creating an opportunity for every member of the Indian workforce. Today, more than 500,000 active jobs and 557,000 companies are represented on the platform in India, providing the Indian workforce with a vast repository of career and networking opportunities. 

Member engagement on the LinkedIn feed globally is at an all-time high, recording sessions growth at 27% year-over-year and 30+ billion sessions in FY19, fuelled by record levels of engagement in the feed content, original content, and growth of video on LinkedIn. To celebrate the members behind this engaged feed, today LinkedIn celebrates India’s most-engaged members with the launch of the annual Top Voices 2019 India List. This year’s list sees names from diverse industries such as financial services and stand-up comedy to industrial minerals. Some of the names on this year’s list include government dignitary Kiran Bedi, spiritual leader Sadhguru, entrepreneur Adhil Shetty, stand-up comedian Rahul Subramaniam, and business leader Poonam Barua. 

Ashutosh Gupta, India Country Head, LinkedIn, said, “We are excited to celebrate 10 strong and successful years of LinkedIn in India, a decade of connecting India’s professionals to diverse opportunities. It has been an exciting journey to see the platform, the member base, and our teams grow strength to strength. To celebrate this milestone, today we announce the Top Voices 2019 India List featuring our most engaged members who have helped create stronger communities and conversations on the platform.”

Pushes forward the ‘Made in India, for the world’ product vision

In November 2011, LinkedIn recognised India’s strong technical and engineering talent and built the first R&D Centre outside Mountain View in Bengaluru. Today, the R&D Centre is leading the charge on building community products for LinkedIn’s global member base, and is a strategic partner to the Global Trust Organisation.

In October 2019, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Events, the first global product to be built in India for the world. The platform’s ‘Made in India’ journey started with the launch of the lightweight mobile website LinkedIn Lite in September 2016, followed by the launch of the Lite Android app in July 2017. Today, LinkedIn Lite has witnessed unprecedented global success, has now scaled to 60+ emerging markets across the world, supports 21+ languages, and has crossed 10 million downloads on Google Playstore. 

Students, young professionals, and SMBs will inspire next phase of growth

Students and young professionals are the fastest growing segment for LinkedIn in Asia Pacific. With more than half the population falling under the age of 25 years and India set to be one of the youngest countries in the world, this segment will continue to be a strategic focus for LinkedIn in India. Our research shows that young professionals feel that their top barriers in achieving opportunities are lack of experience, skills gap, network, and mentorship. 

LinkedIn research also shows that Indian professionals feel that the skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly, and would leave a job due to lack of L&D opportunities. Upskilling and L&D is therefore part of LinkedIn’s broader vision to build a robust jobs and talent marketplace. Going forward, the focus is to help companies solve key talent challenges across planning, hiring and people development, and enable them to build winning teams. 

In India, LinkedIn recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Research (MSR) and Indian Institute of Science (IISC) to advance the highly skilled Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) talent pool in the country. A nation-building initiative, this annual workshop that will take place in January 2020 will give best-in-class students the opportunity to learn from professors and leaders from renowned institutes and companies. 

LinkedIn Social Impact has also partnered with FUEL (Friends Union for Energising Lives), a non-profit organisation, to upskill engineering talent in the country. Through this initiative, LinkedIn aims to build aptitude for engineering students from underprivileged backgrounds to make them employable in the white-collar job market.

With India among the Top 3 startup ecosystems in the world, LinkedIn is also gearing up to support the growth of small businesses with the launch of the new feature ‘Open for Business’ to allow them to showcase their services directly on their profiles.

Focused on closing the ‘network gap’

A recent research conducted by LinkedIn reinforces that a strong professional network can enable job satisfaction and highlights the crucial role of networking in gaining access to employment. This sentiment is reflected in LinkedIn’s ‘Network Trends’ APAC survey findings that highlights that 42% of Indian professionals claim to have an above-average network, and out of the 42%, 88% feel satisfied with their current jobs.

Professional networks and connections matter, and in fact more than 70% of professionals get hired at companies where they already have a connection. 

“Opportunities are not distributed equally, and your professional network plays a critical role in your success. We feel that we have a big role to play to help close this ‘network gap’. In the coming months we will use insights from APAC and India-level research to understand the unique barriers of the network gap in every market. Our goal is to strengthen our members’ professional networks irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds,” added Gupta.

A slice of the Indian economy on LinkedIn in 2019

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