LinkedIn is piloting a free 14-week training program to help workers become their own bosses, a bet that more people will pursue entrepreneurship as artificial intelligence reshapes the job market and traditional career paths grow less certain.
The company launched the Academy of Economic Opportunity in September, enrolling 30 LinkedIn employees in the initial cohort, according to a spokesperson. Students meet three times a week to learn practical business skills, including handling public relations crises, making hiring decisions and pitching investors through simulations. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer, told Fortune that one of the pilot cohort's upcoming sessions focuses on building an app from scratch.
The initiative comes as the labor market becomes harder to break into. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, well 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.
Srinivasan wrote in an Oct. 9 LinkedIn post that the number of people listing «Founder» in their profiles rose nearly 23% over the past year. «The program is focused on helping them learn how to build a business. Not because we believe everyone should become an entrepreneur, but because people are trying new ways to find economic independence in an uncertain world,» he wrote.
Surveys point to growing interest in self-employment. 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 last year by payroll company Gusto found that about half, 51%, cited building financial stability or a future asset as a motivation for starting their businesses, up from 42% in 2024.
Srinivasan said he hopes to scale the Academy internationally and at an affordable price 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,» he 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 testing 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 firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $42 million into the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will offer 50 students courses in areas such as AI inference engineering and guest sessions with leaders including Nvidia's Jensen Huang in San Francisco next year, also without awarding degrees.
The 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 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 have not necessarily abandoned traditional credentials, however. 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 across 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.