LinkedIn Expands Professional 'Learning Hub', Offering Free Access to 40 Popular Courses

LinkedIn is trying to expand its professional education presence once again with the development of its professional Learning Hub, which was launched in beta in April. The Learning Hub helps companies deliver professional development opportunities to their employees by leveraging LinkedIn's data insights to highlight relevant skill paths and career advancement opportunities.

Learning Hub offers all of the features of a standard LXP, including the ability to aggregate all of a company's learning resources, but it's so much more. It uses data and insights from our Skills Graph, the world's most comprehensive skills taxonomy with 36K+ skills, 24M+ job postings, and the largest professional network of 740M+ members, to provide customers with more personalized content, community-based learning, and richer skill development insights.

More firms will have access to the platform as a result of the new expansion, which was revealed in a webinar presented by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. LinkedIn is also making 40 courses available for free to help encourage take-up of the training opportunity.

The free classes will focus on developing aspects of the modern workplace, such as adapting to hybrid arrangements, staff management in a shifting work environment, and strategies for returning to physical workplaces. LinkedIn hopes that by making these courses free, more people will use the Hub, which will lead to a greater dependence on its professional education resources among more companies, thus growing LinkedIn's footprint in the career development area.

Longer on, LinkedIn is expected to charge organizations for access to the Learning Hub, generating yet another revenue source for the company. The Hub will be available for free to LinkedIn Learning Pro members at first, but LinkedIn will examine when to charge for access and how to integrate it into its broader LinkedIn Learning platform for future expansion.

LinkedIn is also looking to tie the tool back into its broader recruitment offerings, as reported by TechCrunch, with the professional development opportunities highlighted directly tying into open positions and helping to fill gaps by mapping LinkedIn's data across both internal and external candidates.

It could be a significant step in broadening LinkedIn's horizons in this regard, and while it will have no direct impact on regular LinkedIn users, it will add more data to LinkedIn's already unrivaled professional knowledge banks, and provide another avenue for the company to improve its broader offerings in this regard.