LinkedIn Pilots Free 14-Week Academy to Train Workers as Founders

LinkedIn is testing a new kind of school, one that does not award degrees and does not require them. The professional networking platform launched the Academy of Economic Opportunity in September, enrolling 30 of its own employees in a free 14-week training program designed to teach workers how to become their own bosses.

Students meet three times a week to practice handling public relations crises, making hiring decisions, and pitching investors through simulations. Hari Srinivasan, the company's chief product officer, told Fortune that one of the pilot cohort's next sessions will focus on building an app from scratch. The program is not meant to push everyone toward entrepreneurship, he said, but to help people learn how to build a business as more workers seek economic independence in an uncertain world.

The pilot arrives at a moment when the traditional job market is becoming harder to break into. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, below economists' expectations of 90,000, and more than a quarter of unemployed Americans, 27.1%, have been out of work for six months or longer. At the same time, artificial intelligence is changing the skills employers demand and casting uncertainty over conventional career paths.

LinkedIn is betting that more workers will look beyond standard employment. Srinivasan wrote in an Oct. 9 LinkedIn post that the number of people putting «Founder» in their profiles rose nearly 23% over the past year. In a survey of 3,000 American adults, Intuit QuickBooks found that a third planned to start a business or side hustle this year, up from 17% who said the same a year earlier. A separate survey of 1,051 new business owners by payroll company Gusto found that about half, 51%, cited building financial stability or a future asset as a motivation, up from 42% in 2024.

The Academy is still in its early stages. Srinivasan hopes to scale it internationally and make it affordable for workers outside LinkedIn, writing that «figuring this out is integral» to the company's mission. The company has not announced when enrollment will open to the public or what it will charge. «There is not a current prerequisite for who can participate in this program,» Srinivasan told Fortune. «We're building an Academy that can serve people at any stage in their career and across industries and careers.»

LinkedIn is not alone in piloting alternatives to traditional credentialing. Harvard Business School launched a $699 startup boot camp that lets entrepreneurs practice investor pitches, sales calls, and board meetings with AI versions of Harvard professors, without earning degrees there. Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz invested $42 million into an alternative to college, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will offer 50 students courses in areas such as AI inference engineering and guest speaker sessions with leaders like Nvidia's Jensen Huang in San Francisco next year, also without awarding degrees. These programs differ in scope but share an emphasis on practical experience over traditional credentials.

For LinkedIn, the approach is also a bet on how AI will change hiring. The company's 2026 labor market report showed that U.S. job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70% year over year. Srinivasan wrote that AI is making it easier for employers to evaluate candidates' actual work, such as portfolios, code, and products they have built, rather than relying on college degrees as «shorthand for talent.» «We've designed our program so students leave with real evidence of what they can do, not a degree,» he wrote.

Employers, however, have not necessarily abandoned traditional credentials. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that removing degree requirements increased the share of workers hired without bachelor's degrees by about 3.5 percentage points in the 11,300 roles analyzed. But because so few roles dropped those requirements, the researchers estimated the change created opportunities for only about 97,000 workers annually, out of 77 million yearly hires. «For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires,» the authors wrote.

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Caroline Mercer

World News Correspondent

Caroline Mercer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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