LinkedIn develops a virtual career counselor

With this patent, LinkedIn has automated the job of career counselors.

Some of the most stressful and life changing decisions that we need to make are related to our careers. Therefore, many people take help from career counselors to figure a career path that would be best for them. Career counselors are professionals who map a persons skill set and interest with various available career paths.

LinkedIn being a network for working professionals has data about career paths of a huge number of people across the world. This week LinkedIn filed a patent application for a computer based virtual career counselor that leverages this information and provides career counseling to users based on a data driven approach.

Accordingly, a LinkedIn user may identify a goal position such as a job that the user wishes to have at some future time, or a desired college degree. Based on this, LinkedIn will automatically identify role models who have held or currently hold the goal career position. Thereafter, it determines trends associated with these role models. Such trends include job titles, college degrees, skill sets, volunteer efforts, a ranking of companies that employ these role models, a ranking of colleges that have granted degrees these role models, a fraction of the role models that have published within a recent time frame, and a fraction of the role models that have filed patent application within a recent time.

For example, a user’s current position is Programmer and the user’s goal position is Chief Technical Officer. If 40% of the computer-selected role models moved from Programmer to Senior Programmer, 30% of the computer-selected role models moved from Programmer to Project Manager, 20% of the computer-selected role models moved from Programmer to Engineer, and 10% of the computer-selected role models moved from Programmer to other jobs, then LinkedIn determines that Senior Programmer is the next career position to be recommended to the user.

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