US Workforce Confidence Index

Workforce Confidence Index → United States

The LinkedIn Market Research team surveys its members daily to understand how they’re feeling about their careers, current company, personal finances, and more. Every two weeks the team aggregates the survey data to analyze the latest in Workforce Confidence trends. Consumer confidence measures have historically been a key indicator of the economy. LinkedIn is in a unique position to measure how people feel, to understand what challenges they’re facing and help find them solutions.

In the WCI survey, LinkedIn market researchers ask LinkedIn members about:

1. Their confidence to get/hold a job, improve their financial situation and progress in their career. That is used to calculate an ICI (Individual Confidence Index) score from their opinions by assigning each respondent a score (-100, -50, 0, +50, +100), based on how much they agree or disagree with the three statements, and then create the composite average score across all statements.

2. Their confidence in how their employer will fare in the next 6 months (better or worse than it is currently doing) to calculate a CIE (Confidence in Employer) outlook score from these opinions. The CIE outlook is the percentage of people who said their employer will be "better off" minus the percentage of people who said it will be "worse off" in the next six months.

3. Workforce trends like the desire for flexibility, four-day work weeks, mental health benefits and more.

Select a category below and you will be directed to corresponding up-to-date data.

Individual confidence in the U.S. | Confidence in employers in the U.S. | Workforce trends in the U.S.

In the WCI survey, LinkedIn market researchers ask LinkedIn members about their confidence to get/hold a job, improve their financial situation and progress in their career. That is used to calculate an ICI (Individual Confidence Index) score from their opinions by assigning each respondent a score (-100, -50, 0, +50, +100), based on how much they agree or disagree with the three statements, and then create the composite average score across all statements.

Nearly three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, individual confidence among U.S. workers is slowing improving, and is relatively strong despite a high inflation rate and a swath of layoffs carried out in 2022.

In the WCI survey, LinkedIn market researchers ask LinkedIn members about their confidence in how their employer will fare in the next six months (better or worse) and calculate a CIE (Confidence in Employer) outlook score from these opinions. The CIE outlook is the percentage of people who said their employer will be "better off" minus the percentage of people who said it will be "worse off" in the next six months.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. workers had low CIE with a score of +3. That number improved steadily over the last two years, aside from a dip in the summer of 2020 as companies faced layoffs, and another dip during the 2020 year-end holidays which saw a surge in COVID-19 cases. The CIE metric was at an all-time high of +43 in Spring 2021 (coinciding with when vaccines became available in the U.S.). CIE then steadily declined until August 2021. From that point, CIE was relatively stable until Spring/Summer 2022 (CIE dropped to +25, coinciding with announcements of layoffs and/or hiring freezes by a number of companies in the U.S.). The last half of 2022 saw two more upswings in U.S. CIE despite continued announcements of layoffs. U.S. CIE was back up at +30 in January 2023.

Every quarter, LinkedIn market researchers ask LinkedIn members a series of new survey questions on workforce trends.

Over 21,000 American professionals responded to this survey question between Sept. 10 to Dec. 2, 2022:

How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following? (5pt scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree)

• I feel prepared for an economic downturn
• I am concerned about rising prices and/or inflation
• I am concerned that my employer/company might be planning budget cuts and/or layoffs
• I use my professional network to get job advice and/or referrals
• The current economic uncertainty is negatively impacting my mental wellbeing

In late 2022, less than a third of Americans (31%) were concerned about budget cuts/layoffs. Concerns over layoffs vary by job functions in the U.S.:

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey from LinkedIn’s market research team that is distributed to members via email every day and aggregated every two weeks. Between 3,000 and 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each two-week wave of the survey. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted-in to research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners, and retirees are excluded from analysis so that we’re able to get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy.

Data is weighted by engagement level to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership and the overall market population are not accounted for.