LinkedIn Launches Hands-On Business Academy as Job Market Sours and AI Reshapes Hiring LinkedIn's new Academy of Economic Opportunity provides practical business training to help workers navigate a tough job market and rising interest in entrepreneurship. The program, starting with 30 LinkedIn employees, focuses on skills like PR crisis management and investor pitching, reflecting a shift toward skills-based hiring over traditional degrees. LinkedIn's new Academy of Economic Opportunity trades degrees for hands-on business training, with plans to eventually expand beyond its first 30 students. The job market is getting harder to break into. LinkedIn Academy Launches To Counter Job Market SlumpThe Bureau of Labor Statistics reported employers added just 29,000 jobs in April, far below expectations, and the unemployment rate rose to 4%. Meanwhile, 27.1% of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer. Now, LinkedIn-the platform built to help users network and find jobs-is launching a school to help workers become their own bosses.The LinkedIn Academy of Economic Opportunity opened in September, enrolling 30 LinkedIn employees in a free 14-week training program, according to a spokesperson. Students meet three times a week to learn things like handling PR crises, making hiring decisions, and pitching investors through simulations. Hari Srinivasan, the company's chief product officer, told CNBC that the company expects the program will help employees launch startups or side businesses.As layoffs surge and casts uncertainty over traditional career paths, LinkedIn is betting more workers will seek opportunities beyond conventional jobs. Srinivasan wrote in an X post that a third of LinkedIn users said they planned to start a business or side hustle this year, up from the 17% who said the same a year earlier.And 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 hopes to scale the Academy internationally and at an affordable price to workers outside of LinkedIn and wrote "figuring this out is integral" to the company's mission.Rivals Offer Boot Camps Without Traditional DegreesThe company has not announced when enrollment will open to the public or what it will charge. 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 also launched an alternative to college, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will offer 50 students courses in things like 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.New Features Highlight Practical Work Evidence Over DegreesThe company's new "work evidence" feature lets users see what kind of work candidates have actually done, and Srinivasan wrote that AI is making it easier for employers to evaluate candidates' actual work-like portfolios, code, and products they've 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. A 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.