What Is Your City's Defining Skill? Check Out This Map to Find Out

"A rich ecosystem of talent."

Perhaps you know your city's most abundant natural resources or its most notable attractions, but what about its most prominent professional skill set?

LinkedIn recently put together an interactive map that ranks the top skills in several cities. It's a tool that it thinks can be helpful for job hunters and tracking trends.

Image source: LinkedIn

"Some professionals considering their next career move may be interested in an area that has a rich ecosystem of talent in their specialty," Sohan Murthy wrote on LinkedIn's official blog. "Others might want to find places where they’d stand out and offer a unique capability and point of view. Businesses evaluating a new location, or a new talent pool to tap, also pay close attention to where those pockets of talents lie."

Here are just a few of the observations that can be drawn from the map:

Follow the oil! Its always fascinating when geological features present themselves in socioeconomic data. Members with skills valued by the petroleum industry are much more likely to found in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and most recently North Dakota.
Rust belt remnants. The automotive industry’s impact on Michigan and parts of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania is evident in the manufacturing and engineering skills held by its members.
Some cities really do fit their stereotype. When we looked at Los Angeles and Nashville, we were a bit amused to see the prominence of music, TV, and drama-related skills. After all, LA has Hollywood, and Nashville is the country music capital of the world!

Image source: LinkedIn