UK’s microbusinesses in a bloom phase

More white-collar professionals are launching their own than be at big firms

Britain’s workforce is thinking small. An analysis of the country’s 19 million LinkedIn users suggest they are swapping large employers for tiny ones.

A snapshot of people’s CVs on LinkedIn shows a 30 per cent increase in the number of self-employed users since last year and a 43 per cent increase in those employed at companies with fewer than 10 staff.

Meanwhile, there was a 7.5 per cent decline in the numbers working for companies with 5,000 to 10,000 employees and a 15 per cent drop in the number of people working for companies even larger than that.

The data add to the evidence of a boom in the number of microbusinesses in Britain. More new UK companies opened their doors in 2014 than at any point since 2000, according to the Office for National Statistics. As the economy has recovered since 2011, the rate that businesses have started has exceeded the rate they have folded.

Self-employment has been a big part of that story: the ranks of the self-employed have swelled since the crisis from 3.8 million to 4.5 million, about 15 per cent of the workforce.

While this may reflect a new spirit of entrepreneurship in Britain, there are other reasons for the growth of self-employment too, including the lack of other options during the prolonged downturn that followed the 2009 financial crisis. Some companies are also starting to employ more contractors at arm’s length to perform work that was once done in-house, which makes it easier for them to adjust the size of their workforce to meet demand.

Linkedin’s data also showed a sharp drop during the past year in the number of users who describe themselves as having administrative, accounting, research and support roles. Dr. Craig Holmes, an academic at Oxford University, said that could be a sign those roles were becoming automated.