Labor market data outside the United States remains fragmented and often inaccessible. This creates major blind spots for employers and policymakers alike in navigating an increasingly global workforce.
Chris Kibarian, CEO of Lightcast, is working to change that. With a career built on turning around complex organizations and scaling data-driven businesses, Kibarian now leads one of the world’s largest labor market analytics firms with a mission to make workforce data usable across borders.
“Once you get outside the US, labor market data is so much harder to get,” Kibarian said in an interview hosted by the National Association of Workforce Boards. “[Data is] not necessarily compiled, not public, it’s protected behind regulatory walls.”
This lack of transparency poses a major challenge, especially as knowledge work transcends borders. Kibarian believes solving this will require years of effort and relentless execution.
Kibarian’s leadership style at Lightcast was shaped by his previous career moves. At Randstad Digital Ventures, he spearheaded scaling tech-enabled services and data businesses. In early-stage ventures like IFTTT and YouCaring, he pushed some promising entrepreneurs to bring new ideas to market.
At Lightcast, his team is building what he calls “an essential asset of workforce development,” aiming to replicate the depth and usability of US labor data for markets worldwide.
“Geographies don’t represent captive labor markets anymore,” he said.
The company uses AI-powered tools and human expertise to analyze over 2.5 billion job postings and billions of worker profiles. Through software and custom data delivery, Lightcast helps clients detect real-time skill gaps and track economic and workforce trends across regions and industries. Central to this is its proprietary skill taxonomy, which is a structured system that translates between what workers can do and what jobs actually require.
“We want to unlock new possibilities in the labor market worldwide,” Kibarian emphasized. “It’s an audacious goal.”
