Members who updated their skills on a regular basis (multiple times a year) received promotions 11% faster than those who rarely updated their skills. This speaks to the value of continuous learning and instilling a learning culture. (It also emphasizes the importance of keeping your LinkedIn profile up to date!)
Final thoughts
Previously, similar LinkedIn data showed that technology pros with soft skills received faster promotions. Today’s new data affirms that this holds true across all members, not just tech workers. Though soft skills may be harder to quantify than hard skills, it’s important to remember that they can sometimes count for more.
Methodology
Only full-time employees in the last four years (January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2023) are considered. Career impact examines the aggregated and anonymized data on LinkedIn members who had full-time employment and were promoted in the last four years. Only members who started a job and were promoted internally in the last four years are included.
The analysis only considers promotions where the seniority increased by either one or two career levels at a time and excludes members who were promoted in less than three months of starting a new job. To understand the impact of adding a soft skill (for example, communication), two sets of members are created: members who have at least one hard skill and communication and members who only have hard skills. The average time to get promoted is then compared for these two sets of members. Only those members who added the skill before the promotion date are included. Skills held by fewer than 40,000 members are excluded from the analysis.
The frequency of skill updates is determined by calculating the average difference in number of days between the updates. If a member has less than three skill updates in the last four years, they are categorized as “infrequent.” If the average number of days between updates was fewer than 180 days, they are categorized as “quarterly” or more.
