LinkedIn report says Philly may have a surplus of healthcare talent

A report from LinkedIn published Thursday posits that Philly is one of the only major American cities with a surplus of healthcare workers. The conclusion is based on the self-reported skills from workers on the site, which has a database of 138 million professionals in the U.S.

“What’s happening in Philadelphia is good news for job seekers: hiring in May was up 16.9% compared to May 2016,” said LinkedIn comms manager Joseph Roualdes. “The one exception is job seekers who have healthcare skills — like pharmaceutical, clinical trial and healthcare management skills. Philadelphia has too many workers with those skills, likely due to its abundance of medical schools.”

(Speaking of the life sciences sector, here are some takeaways from our roundtable on the topic during Philly Tech Week 2017 presented by Comcast.)

The top 10 skills with “abundance” (i.e., more professionals available than jobs open) in Philadelphia, according to the report are:

• Pharmaceutical
• Healthcare management
• Medical and healthcare
• Clinical trial
• Chemistry
• Life sciences
• General finance
• SAP ERP systems
• Software engineering management and requirements gathering
• Database and direct marketing

Curiously enough, software development doesn’t top the list of scarce skills in Philadelphia, as at least one report from the Brookings Institute points out. Here are the top 10:

• Radio broadcasting
• TV & video production
• Photography
• Politics
• Marketing event management
• Social media marketing
• Mechanical and aerospace engineering
• C/C++
• Beauty services
• Aviation

The study also tracks talent migration from Philly to other cities. According to LinkedIn user info, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., gained the most workers from Philadelphia in the last 12 months. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Philly, 2.89 workers moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the last year, whereas 1.79 left for Los Angeles and 1.53 moved to our nation’s capital.

Conversely, three Pennsylvania cities were the top suppliers of talent to Philly: namely State College, Allentown and Scranton.