LinkedIn Pilots Free Academy to Train Workers as Founders Without Degrees
LinkedIn has launched a 14-week pilot program, the Academy of Economic Opportunity, to teach employees how to build businesses as AI reshapes hiring and more workers pursue entrepreneurship. The company has not yet announced public enrollment or pricing.
LinkedIn is testing a new kind of school, one that does not award degrees and is designed to help workers become their own bosses. 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, according to a company spokesperson.
Students in the pilot meet three times a week to work through simulations on topics such as handling public relations crises, making hiring decisions, and pitching investors. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer, told Fortune that one of the cohort's upcoming sessions will focus on building an app from scratch.
The initiative arrives at a moment when the job market is becoming harder to break into. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, well below economists' expectations of 90,000. More than a quarter of unemployed Americans, 27.1%, have been out of work for six months or longer.
LinkedIn is betting that as artificial intelligence changes the skills employers demand and casts uncertainty over traditional career paths, more workers will look beyond conventional jobs. 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,» Srinivasan 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 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 hopes to scale the Academy internationally and at an affordable price for workers outside LinkedIn. He wrote 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 a different approach to helping people start businesses outside 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 they 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 also 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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