The work-from-home debate has suffered in general from a paucity of data.

In that vacuum, executives including David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Jaime Dimon from J.P. Morgan and Elon Musk at Twitter have insisted employees get back to the office.

They argue that remote work hurts productivity.

Another consideration, however, was recently raised by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, who released some fascinating data on employment trends pre- and post-Covid.

Leveraging unique data from 875 million users in 200 countries, Roslansky notes that the number of remote jobs has surged and those are the jobs that are attracting most of the attention. Specifically, the data shows:

-14% of jobs advertised on LinkedIn were remote, up from 1% pre-Covid.
-More than half of all job applications go to those 14% of remote positions.

One byproduct of Covid was the fascinating data it generated.

Before Covid, Roslansky said job changes on the platform were plus or minus 1 percent. In the heart of the Covid lockdown that plunged to -20 percent only to skyrocketed to 100 percent during the “Great Reshuffle,” as many people reevaluated options.

Breaking down the Reshuffle generationaly, he said that Baby Boomers barely moved, Gen X jumped 300% and since have re-settled back to about 1%.

Gen Z, however, is still moving at an unheard of rate of 30%.

Roslansky said that Gen Z workers seem to feel like “you are supposed to move jobs frequently. That’s just how the world works.”

If that trend continues it’s hard to imagine that employers will cut themselves off from that talent pool.

Another counterintuitive datapoint that emerged from the LinkedIn data is where people are moving for work. The three biggest markets are New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

So apparently, people still want to live and work in cities. Many of them just don’t want to work in offices.

H/t to the The Transcript. Click here to see the Tweet.  Click here for the audio.