We found that there is an extensive base of skilled tech workers across the UK, with 2.2 million LinkedIn members identifying themselves as having tech skills. If we think about this in the context of the working population in the UK, at just over 32 million people (ONS, 2017) and all UK LinkedIn members at 23 million, it’s clear that members with tech skills comprise a sizeable and significant proportion of the national skills pool.

We define tech skills as the ability to do something productive using digital technology, and in this report we’re using this definition with reference to work, rather than everyday life. Examples of tech skills range from Java Development, and Application Packaging to Computing. LinkedIn collates thousands of unique terms that members use in their profiles to describe a whole host of attributes like knowledge, abilities, behaviours, work activities, and skills as conventionally understood. Members indicate the skills they hold within the skills section of their online profile. LinkedIn clusters the individual skills that members choose to display into categories for analysis, approximately two hundred skill clusters. Each skill cluster is then further aggregated into ‘parent clusters’ to enable analysis. LinkedIn’s analysis is based on members whose skills fall into the tech skills cluster.