LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer is familiar with the challenges facing job seekers, from slower hiring to AI, but he also sees opportunity.
Aneesh Raman told Business Insider that he believes job seekers can build meaningful careers by identifying their strengths, continuing to learn, and creating what he calls a “story of self.”
This is especially important for young people. In the New York Fed’s analysis of 35 years of jobs data, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 hasn’t exceeded the broader US jobless rate by as much as it did in March, the most recent month available: 5.8% of recent graduates were unemployed, compared with 4% of workforce ages 16 to 65.
However, recent grads aren’t the only ones struggling to find work. Excluding a brief pandemic-related dip, US businesses are hiring at nearly the lowest rate since 2013, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Layoffs remain low by historical standards, but for many who need a job, the market is considerably tougher than it was a few years ago.
I asked Raman about these challenges and what job seekers can do to stand out. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What advice would you give to young people who are struggling to find work and want to set themselves up for future career success?
I think the most important, difficult, and exciting task that entry-level workers should start with is to define their story of self. What are the skills that you uniquely have and that you’ve built across lived and learned experience?
The second step is to learn something every day. That starts with AI. What are the tools? How do you use them? How are you using them in service of the skills that you’ve got, in service of the expertise you want to build? But over time, that learning is going to be around these core curiosities that are going to drive what you do in your job. And so starting to make all of that part of your daily habit of how you’re going to build your career, it’s going to pay off big time.
I’ve lived this story. My career makes absolutely no sense by job title, and that was a hard thing at times, where I had this really interesting but squiggly-line career that made it really hard for people to know what I could come into that organization and do better than anyone else. But when I looked at it as a skillset across all my jobs, from war reporter to Obama speech writer to working at Facebook, to here, explanatory storytelling has been core from the start.
Now I have a job that is uniquely the sort of role for me to play at LinkedIn at this time. And I think that’s what folks should start thinking about. How do you build a career that is building toward a job that you can do better than anyone else, based on these core things you’re learning that are unique to your skills and expertise?
Can you share more about what it means to define your “story of self”?
It actually starts with having a good pitch for yourself, not for an employer: having a story of self that you are excited about, that is based on skills that you might not even recognize are these great superpowers you have, and that you should really be building your career around. Storytelling for me was not a skillset that I self-identified with until very recently, and now it’s core to how I understand my ability to do something that the world values and needs.
So you have to come to a story of self that you’re excited about, and if you’re excited about it, that excitement is going to come across in every interview you do. And it’s going to make you more desirable as an applicant because you’re going to bring this sort of energy and conviction about what you want to do in that role with those skills and that expertise, including a desire to learn and a desire to grow that is going to just make you stand out.
Do you think the adoption of AI is making it harder for young people to find jobs?
I think right now, in many ways, it is the best of times and the worst of times to be entering the workforce. There is a great deal of uncertainty across companies about how to adopt AI, and a growing focus on the tasks of entry-level work as one place where AI is able to help deliver more and more quickly. We know that job seekers are hearing less than they want from recruiters.
But what I want entry-level workers to know is that there are also all these signs that it is the best of times to be early in your career. I think you’re going to have more and more people moving jobs within companies where they’re getting greater ability to learn and grow and do more interesting work more quickly than the old world of work would’ve allowed.
We’re also going to see career planning change. There will be a lot more agency for individuals to build their careers in their twenties around the skills and behaviors they want to hone.
And that means as you get further in your career in your forties, you’re going to have much more ability to define for yourself what impact you want to have with the job, where you want to work, and that’s something that’s new. The ability to really build a career on your terms is new, and it’s just starting.
I think the future of work is going to be one where no one beats you at being you, and that’s exciting. It’s also new, and so everyone’s going to have to figure out their way to define what it is about them that no one can beat them at, that they can build a career around.
How much of young people’s job search struggles can be explained by economic conditions that might improve?
I think work is going to change for everyone, no matter what the quarterly or annual atmospherics are around the economy. We’re entering a new economy. The knowledge economy that we’ve lived in for about half a century is on the way out. The new “it” skills, the new hard skills, are the non-technical skills — the unique capabilities we have as humans. We know that people skills are becoming more and more core to how people are getting hired and promoted, including software engineers. It’s going to affect every sector at work.
How can employers and educational institutions better collaborate to prepare young workers for roles that AI can’t easily replace?
I think the most important thing for anyone who can affect the systems that surround work is to be pro-human. And it’s important for me to start there because nothing about the story of work has really been a story of humans at work. It’s always been a story of technology at work. And so all the systems that surround work, from education to employment to entrepreneurship, have been built around a diminished role of humans at work and increasing productivity and efficiency.
I think being pro-human means redesigning these systems with two goals in mind. The first is to help every worker become AI literate. Everyone at every stage of their career should be asking their company and their employers to help them get more familiar with AI tools and become better at using them. So that’s one area of focus that I think employers and educators should be urgently focused on.
The second one is helping everyone become an entrepreneur. And that doesn’t mean you have to go launch a business: It just means we all have to become more entrepreneurial as humans at work. And so that is a mix of the curiosity, creativity, and compassion that go into coming up with new ideas and working with others to refine them. It includes behaviors like resilience, adaptability, and developing conviction that you see a lot of entrepreneurs have to hold true to.
I think the most important thing for any young worker is to both acknowledge the difficulty of this moment, but to push past the fear and really start to figure out how you want to build this career that earlier generations of workers could never have imagined. Being able to just build the career they want, AI’s ability to help you learn and grow, and AI’s ability to help you build and scale products and businesses. This is a different moment than any other generation has had going into work. So make sure you’re seeing that as much as you’re managing the day-to-day difficulty of the job market right now.
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