Business 5 min read By Arthur Ellington
LinkedIn Launches Free 14-Week Academy to Train Workers as Founders
LinkedIn has begun piloting a free 14-week programme, the Academy of Economic Opportunity, teaching 30 employees how to build businesses without earning a degree, as AI reshapes hiring and more workers pursue self-employment.
LinkedIn has started piloting a free 14-week training programme designed to help workers become their own bosses, as artificial intelligence reshapes the skills employers demand and more professionals seek alternatives to conventional careers.
The Academy of Economic Opportunity enrolled 30 LinkedIn employees in September, according to a company 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, said one of the pilot cohort's next sessions will focus on building an app from scratch.
The initiative reflects a broader shift in how workers approach their careers. Srinivasan wrote in an October 9 LinkedIn post that the number of people listing «Founder» in their LinkedIn profiles rose nearly 23 per cent 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.
Labour market data underscores the uncertainty. Employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, well below economists' expectations of 90,000, and more than a quarter of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer. Separate surveys point to growing appetite for self-employment: an Intuit QuickBooks poll of 3,000 American adults found a third planned to start a business or side hustle this year, up from 17 per cent a year earlier. A Gusto survey of 1,051 new business owners found about half cited building financial stability or a future asset as a motivation, up from 42 per cent in 2024.
LinkedIn is not alone in testing alternatives to traditional credentialing. Harvard Business School has launched a $699 startup boot camp where entrepreneurs practise investor pitches, sales calls and board meetings with AI versions of Harvard professors, without earning a degree. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $42 million in 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.
These programmes 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 labour market report showed that US job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70 per cent year on 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 analysed. But because so few roles dropped those requirements, 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.
Srinivasan said he hopes to scale the Academy internationally and at an affordable price for workers outside LinkedIn, describing the effort as integral to the company's mission. The company has not announced when enrolment 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.»
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