Why Linkedin is stuck in the 20th century

By Neil Patrick

Yes I know. It’s a provocative headline. Sorry LinkedIn. But note I didn’t call this “Why I hate LinkedIn” (which I don’t) or “Why you should quit LinkedIn” (which I don’t think we should). But paradoxically, I do think LinkedIn is saddled with a 20th century take on the careers world. And this is why.

It all goes back to how LinkedIn was originally conceived. And that was largely as a tool for recruiters and headhunters to find people with particular skills and experience. Founders Jeff Weiner and Reid Hoffman recognized 11 years ago that the internet had yet to make much impact in the vast global business of recruitment and networking. And that the potential for an online platform that could assist this industry was immense.

It was launched in May 2003, three months before Myspace, one year before Facebook and three years before Twitter. And it reflected the world as it was then. Not as it is now.

In this post here I talked about the zero marginal cost society and the things we need to do to have a chance of career survival in it. The pace of technological progress is outstripping the abilities of humans and society to develop fast enough to keep up. And that’s a problem.

But let’s get back to why I think Linkedin is stuck in the 20th century.

It’s simple really. Linkedin mandates that we can only be one thing in our professional lives. We can only have one career and can only be specialists in one field. Of course I know that we can display all sorts of competencies on our LinkedIn profile. And sometimes this solves the problem. But not always.

Let’s say for example you are both a copywriter AND a chef. Not an unlikely possibility in this age when neither of these occupations pay especially well for most people. You can put both things on your profile. But you are immediately forced into a compromise. Are your a chef or a copywriter? Your networks for these two areas of your life are virtually completely separate. The skills for both have few overlaps. And the result is that you are forced into a compromised profile, in which you cannot shine neither as a writer, nor as a chef.

Linkedin only allows any of us to have one profile. That’s it. We cannot be more than one thing at one time. It’s like the old Russian proverb which says, ‘If you chase two rabbits, you’ll catch neither”.

This may be a constraint for us, but it suits LinkedIn’s business model and their main customers (recruiters). It also is a throwback to what I called the "world of ones" which I described here. In essence, the world of ones is a 20th century hangover in which everyone was expected to serve one career, one employer, one partner, one monarch and one God. And today, Linkedin wants us all to be just one thing at a time in our careers.

The zero marginal cost society, the second machine age, or the third industrial revolution, call it what you will. But the 21st century world requires adaptation,flexibility and rapid skills acquisition from its people. This means that overlaps in our career activities will become more and more of a necessity.

Not the one label, one specialism box that LinkedIn wants us all to fit neatly into. That’s a 20th century viewpoint and one which I think is passing its sell by date fast.

I suspect that one reason that LinkedIn wants things this way is to try and keep its network clean of imposters and fake profiles. That’s good for the whole community.

But it’s not helping the increasing numbers of us who are trying to succeed in more than one field simultaneously. Those of us who have more than one competency. And those of us who are attempting to build a wider and more diverse skill set to try and have a chance of becoming flexible and multi-skilled enough to survive in the 21st century.

And that's why I think LinkedIn is out of date already, just ten years or so after it's creation...

Ironic isn't it?

If you have any thoughts about this topic, do please share them in the comments below.