Banks are the best workplaces for your career

The big four Australian banks are the best companies for your career progression, according to new data from networking platform LinkedIn.

Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac, and ANZ make up four of the top five workplaces on LinkedIn’s list of the 25 best workplaces for career growth in Australia 2022.

Only Woolworths interrupted a clean sweep at the top for the big four, taking the second spot between CommBank and NAB.

The supermarket has been expanding its e-commerce offerings through the pandemic, announcing a $100 million investment in an automated warehouse for home deliveries this time last year.

It also spent $223 million on a controlling stake in AI company Quantium to “unlock value” from its customer data.

Woolworths and the big four banks have improved their spots on last year’s best companies list, as has Salesforce which jumped up from 12 to 8.

Amazon and IBM, on the other hand, have dropped out of the top 25 while Google parent company Alphabet has stayed in the number 10 spot.

Local tech giant Atlassian went up four spaces to number 13 while design darling Canva is once again missing from the LinkedIn list.

The big four consulting firms – Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG – were also scattered among the best companies for career growth.

Small businesses and startups were left out of the list since LinkedIn only wanted to capture companies with at least 500 employees as of December last year.

The data is gleamed from seven metrics LinkedIn has applied to companies for similar lists around the world.

Those metrics are: ability to advance, skills growth, company stability, external opportunity, company affinity, gender diversity, and educational background.

Looking at how LinkedIn pulls the list together is an interesting exercise in seeing the kinds of data captured by the social media platform and how it analyses network effects in an attempt to evaluate workplaces.

‘Company affinity’, for example, is a measurement of culture done by checking how well the profiles of a company’s employees are connected on LinkedIn.

‘Ability to advance’ looks at internal promotions and the state of people’s careers when they move to a different company.

The underlying assumption is that LinkedIn is an accurate representation of corporate Australia – which may not be far off given estimates from last that at least 60 per cent of Australia’s adult population is on the platform.

It also uses ‘standardised’ skills and job titles which may not properly capture people who non-standard job titles or unlisted skillsets.

Of course, it’s not just LinkedIn that can use data from the site given a prevalence for data scraping from the LinkedIn API that has led to leaks of data on nearly one billion users.

Here is the complete list of LinkedIn's 'Top 25 Companies to Grow Your Career in Australia' for 2022: