LinkedIn: Workers in Democratic Chicago Are Leaving Illinois Altogether
The nation’s largest online professional network tracks where in the country workers are moving to and from.
Illinois’ largest cities are seeing movement to Chicago, then out of Illinois.
LinkedIn’s monthly employment report tracks skill and location changes of more than 150 million workers across the country.
In Chicago, they found hiring has dropped almost five percent since last month.
LinkedIn chief economist Guy Berger said the data shows a significant number of workers from Chicago leaving to the cities like Nashville, Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Some of it is purely a weather play, while some of it is that these places are just very economically vital,” he said. “It’s this long-running trend that, as the housing market in the Southeast and Southwest has recovered, is reasserting itself.”
Nearly seven out of every 10,000 LinkedIn-registered workers in Nashville moved there from Chicago in the last year, much more than any other city. The next highest was neighboring Knoxville, Tennessee, at 3.87.
Berger says the report shows Champaign-Urbana as one of the top exporters of workers in the nation, likely because the University of Illinois produces a large number of professionals entering the workforce.
“It’s one of the core cities that educate people that go to work in Chicago,” he said.
The site classifies the Chicago suburbs as the “greater Chicago area.”
The report also looks at how many companies are seeking and hiring workers with specific skills and which skills people most commonly have that are looking for work.
They call it a skill surplus if many more workers have a skill and a skill shortage if companies need it and can’t find workers that have it.
Berger says the data shows Chicago and other large cities in Illinois need good communicators and managers of people.
Chicago had a shortage of 49,096 people with oral communications skills.
Cole Lauterbach reports on Illinois government and statewide issues for Illinois News Network and Watchdog.org. He has produced radio shows for stations in Bloomington/Normal and Peoria, and created award-winning programs for Comcast SportsNet Chicago.
A version of this article previously appeared on the Watchdog website under the headline, “LinkedIn: Workers from Illinois go to Chicago, then leave the state”
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