Skills will replace degrees as the top employment criteria, says LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky

The future belongs to the skilled feels Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn.

According to the head of the popular job portal and professional networking platform LinkedIn, skills, particularly tech skills are more in demand than ever The veteran business personality visited India on Monday for the first time since taking over as the CEO in 2020.

In an interview with the Times of India, the entrepreneur told that despite the current lull in the job market and the volatile nature of employment, he has high hopes for Indian professionals.


Indian professionals are one of the most active demographics on LinkedIn. A 2022 survey showed that there nearly 84900,000 LinkedIn users were from India. Indians made up nearly 5.9 per cent of its traffic. In the interview, Roslansky affirmed the growing popularity of the platform among Indians. “ India has become LinkedIn’s fastest-growing market in terms of member growth and engagement. India's revenue is up 84 per cent compared to two years ago. There’s something really special that’s going on right now in India,” said the CEO.

However, that’s not the reason why Roslansky has set high hopes for Indian professionals. The LinkedIn CEO feels that Indian employees are more up-to-date on activities others take for granted such as hustling for jobs, making the right connections, and learning on the job. This go-getting attitude is what sets Indian job-seekers apart from the rest. “Compared to the rest of the world, members in India are over-indexing on networking, on messaging, on job seeking, on learning, which is unique,” he explained.

Skill Not Degrees Is The Future Of Employment

For centuries criteria such as educational background, certificates, and relevant work experience have been at the forefront of selecting the ‘right candidate and creating job roles. Although those will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future, hard (and soft) skills will take over as the yardstick through which a job-seeker’s eligibility will be judged. Roslansky feels that the job market is in a constant state of flux where roles are being displaced and rewritten on a continuous basis, and the only way to keep up with the demands is to up-skill. “ Even if you aren’t changing jobs, your job is most likely changing on you. For too long, we have used degrees, work experience, and networks to connect talent to jobs because we didn’t have anything better…. But now we are focusing on people who know what to do,” he was quoted as saying to the English daily.

Upskill Or Lag Behind

On average professionals who are invested in updating their skill sets and ensuring their skills change with the demands of the industry will remain in demand. The CEO also went on to say that software engineers who update their skills on their LinkedIn profiles receive eight times more messages from recruiters. financial analysts in India who keep their skills up to date on their profiles receive five times more messages.

Top 5 Most In-Demand Skill In The Job Market

Roslansky revealed that the research team at LinkedIn has created a skills graph of 38,000 most sought-after across the LinkedIn graph of over 875 million members. In India, the top five skills that are in demand from employers across the member base are SQL, Java, HTML, C++, and Python.