LinkedIn has launched a new school aimed at teaching workers how to start businesses, with a pilot class of 30 employees already enrolled.
The Academy of Economic Opportunity began in September as a free 14-week training program, according to a spokesperson. Students meet three times a week and work through simulations that cover PR crises, hiring decisions, and pitching investors. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer, said one of the next sessions is on building an app from scratch.
The company is positioning the program as a response to a tighter job market and to AI's effect on hiring. 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, 27.1%, of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer. Srinivasan wrote in an Oct. 9 LinkedIn post that the number of people putting 'Founder' in their LinkedIn profiles rose nearly 23% over the past year.
In a statement on LinkedIn, Srinivasan said the program is 'focused on helping them learn how to build a business' because 'people are trying new ways to find economic independence in an uncertain world.' He also said there is 'not a current prerequisite for who can participate' and that the company is building an academy that can serve people at any stage in their career and across industries.
LinkedIn has said it wants to scale the academy internationally and make it affordable for workers outside the platform, but it has not announced when enrollment will open to the public or what it will charge.
The move fits a broader push toward practical training over traditional credentials. Harvard Business School has launched a $699 startup boot camp, and Andreessen Horowitz invested $42 million into the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will offer 50 students courses in AI inference engineering and guest speaker sessions with Jensen Huang next year. LinkedIn's own 2026 labor market report said U.S. job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70% year over year.
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 the researchers estimated that change created opportunities for only about 97,000 workers annually, out of 77 million yearly hires.
The market has already voted on the problem LinkedIn is trying to solve: when hiring gets harder and credentials stop working as a clean shortcut, workers look for leverage elsewhere. Capital rewards clear rules, real skills and evidence of production, not paper alone. That is why programs like this matter, even if they are still small and experimental.
