LinkedIn has launched a pilot academy to teach workers how to start and run businesses, as a weakening US jobs market and changing skill demands make traditional career paths less certain.
The Academy of Economic Opportunity began in September with 30 LinkedIn employees taking part in a free, 14-week programme. Participants meet three times a week for practical exercises covering areas including handling public relations crises, making hiring decisions and pitching to investors.
Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, said one of the cohort’s forthcoming sessions would involve building an app from scratch.
The initiative is aimed at helping people pursue economic independence, rather than suggesting that entrepreneurship should be the next step for everyone. Srinivasan wrote that the programme was designed to help participants “learn how to build a business” because people were seeking new ways to earn a living in an uncertain world.
The move comes after US employers added 29,000 jobs last month, well below economists’ expectations of 90,000. More than a quarter of unemployed Americans – 27.1 per cent – have been out of work for at least six months.
LinkedIn said the number of users describing themselves as a “Founder” on their profiles had risen by almost 23 per cent over the past year. A survey of 3,000 American adults by Intuit QuickBooks found that one in three planned to start a business or side hustle this year, compared with 17 per cent the previous year.
Separate research by payroll company Gusto found that 51 per cent of 1,051 new business owners surveyed last year cited financial stability or creating a future asset as a reason for starting their businesses. That figure had been 42 per cent in 2024.
LinkedIn plans to expand its business academy
Srinivasan said LinkedIn hoped to expand the academy internationally and make it affordable for people outside the company. No date has been announced for public enrolment, and LinkedIn has not said what the programme would cost.
He said there was currently no prerequisite for joining, adding that the academy was being developed for people “at any stage in their career and across industries and careers”.
The pilot reflects a wider interest in practical business education that does not lead to a formal degree. Harvard Business School has launched a 699-dollar start-up boot camp featuring simulated investor pitches, sales calls and board meetings with AI versions of Harvard professors.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has also invested 42 million dollars in an alternative college programme. Its Horowitz Andreessen Academy is due to offer courses including AI inference engineering to 50 students in San Francisco next year, without awarding degrees.
LinkedIn’s approach is also tied to changes in hiring. The company’s 2026 labour market report said US job adverts requiring AI literacy skills had increased by 70 per cent year on year.
Srinivasan said employers were increasingly able to assess candidates through portfolios, code and products they had created, rather than using university degrees as a “shorthand for talent”. He wrote that academy participants would leave with “real evidence of what they can do, not a degree”.
However, degree requirements remain widespread. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that removing such requirements increased the proportion of workers hired without bachelor’s degrees by about 3.5 percentage points across 11,300 roles.
Because relatively few employers removed degree requirements, the researchers estimated that the change created opportunities for about 97,000 workers a year, out of 77 million annual hires. They wrote that the increased opportunity promised by skills-based hiring had appeared in “not even 1 in 700 hires”.
