LinkedIn has today published its 2021 listing of the top 50 companies to work for, based on a range of factors, including company stability, accessible opportunities and gender diversity, among others.

Which is not overly interesting in a social media context – but what is of interest here is exactly how LinkedIn has assessed each element, which highlights yet another way that LinkedIn is increasingly utilizing its unmatched professional dataset to improve career outcomes, and highlight opportunities.

As explained by LinkedIn, the Top 50 listing takes into account seven key factors, which are all based on LinkedIn data:

• Ability to advance tracks employee promotions within a company and when they move to a new company, based on standardized job titles
• Skills growth looks at how employees across the company are gaining skills while employed at the company, using standardized LinkedIn skills
• Company stability tracks attrition over the past year, as well as the percentage of employees that stay at the company for at least three years
• External opportunity looks at LinkedIn Recruiter outreach across employees at the company, signaling demand for workers coming from these companies
• Company affinity seeks to measure how supportive a company’s culture is by looking at connection volume on LinkedIn among employees (controlled for company size)
• Gender diversity measures gender parity within a company and its subsidiaries
• Educational background examines the variety of educational attainment among employees, from no degree up to Ph.D. levels, reflecting a commitment to recruiting a wide range of professionals

​Based on these elements, LinkedIn has established top 50 company listings – which is essentially a top 50 listing of the best companies on LinkedIn, taking into account these various actions.

Which, again, is an interesting use of LinkedIn data, underlining the many ways that such insights can be useful, and can help guide LinkedIn users towards relevant, viable career paths.

Based on this, for example, students could assess rising opportunities, and map pathways towards more viable, beneficial career opportunities. Businesses could look at the same factors, and assess their own processes by examining the data available to them, with the overall perspective potentially helping to improve approaches to employee retention and development, based solely on LinkedIn insight.

As such, the listing itself may not be as interesting as the methodology, and the lessons available within that. But still, it is worth taking note of the full list, while LinkedIn has also published regional variations to highlight brands in your nation.

In the US, the top 10 businesses, as identified by LinkedIn, are:

1. Amazon
2. Alphabet
3. JP Morgan & Chase
4. AT&T
5. Bank of America
6. IBM
7. Deloitte
8. Apple
9. Walmat
10. EY

Some will no doubt debate the listing, but again, you can asses the full methodology above, and work out how that applies in each case.

It’s an interesting experiment either way – you can take a look at the full LinkedIn Top Companies 2021 overview here.