Digital Transformation of Chinese Industries: A Digital Talent Perspective

The LinkedIn Economic Graph is a digital representation of the global economy based on 645M members, 35k skills, 30 million employers, more than 20 million open jobs and 90k educational institutions. With this data, LinkedIn can analyze and predict economic trends, such as cross-regional talent migration and skills gap analysis. These insights will help every member of the global workforce, as well as global policy makers and educational and training institutions, and better connect people to economic opportunity.

Based upon information drawn from approximately 910,000 of LinkedIn’s 48 million members in China, the likes of whom met the qualifications necessary to be called “digital talent”, LinkedIn China has joined hands with Tsinghua SEM Center for Internet Development and Governance (CIDG), in publishing “Digital Transformation of Chinese Industries: A Digital Talent Perspective Report”, which analyzes digital talent flows and development trends to examine the history of China’s digital transformation, and to uncover the future opportunities that lie within. 

 

Key Findings:

• Software and IT services and manufacturing have emerged as the two industries with the largest shares of digital talent. At the same time, digital talent has started to congregate in areas such as consumer goods, finance, education, and corporate services, thus helping these more traditional industries lay the foundation for further digital transformation.
• Other industries – especially when compared with software and IT services – appear relatively a low attractiveness to digital talent and are currently experiencing a net outflow. This also implies that the flow of digital talent from traditional industries into ICT has helped achieve an integration of traditional industry related skills and ICT skills.
• Digital talent began a gradual trend towards China’s core urban areas, with the top four cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou enjoying particularly obvious growth. At the same time, the proportion of digital talent in some cities such as Nanjing, Suzhou, Dalian, and Shenyang have begun to trend downward.
• Cutting-edge digital talents, also known as ABCD talents, which are consisted of those individuals working in artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing, and data science, can be found mainly in the software and IT service industry (which houses more than 35% of ABCD talent). ABCD individuals also feature prominently in manufacturing (11% of ABCD talent) and finance (9% of ABCD talent), which rank second and third, respectively.

 

Click through the link to download the full report of the English version.