LinkedIn pilots Academy of Economic Opportunity for workers

LinkedIn's pilot arrives as the job market is getting harder to break into. 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.

The Academy joins other non-degree programs from Harvard Business School and Andreessen Horowitz. Harvard launched a $699 startup boot camp where entrepreneurs practice pitches with AI versions of Harvard professors. 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 Nvidia's Jensen Huang in San Francisco next year.

LinkedIn's approach is also a bet on how AI will change hiring. The company's 2026 labor market report showed U.S. job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70% year over year. But employers haven't necessarily abandoned degrees. 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, creating opportunities for only about 97,000 workers annually out of 77 million yearly hires.