The U.S. job market is proving harder to break into. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employers added just 29,000 jobs last month, well below the 90,000 economists had expected, and more than a quarter of unemployed Americans—27.1%—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 designed to help workers become their own bosses.

LinkedIn started the Academy of Economic Opportunity in September, enrolling 30 of its own employees in a free 14-week training program, according to a company spokesperson. Students meet three times a week for simulation-based lessons in handling public relations crises, making hiring decisions, and pitching investors. Hari Srinivasan, the company's chief product officer, told Fortune that one of the pilot cohort's next sessions covers building an app from scratch.

The initiative reflects LinkedIn's bet that, as artificial intelligence reshapes the skills employers demand and casts uncertainty over traditional career paths, more workers will seek opportunities beyond conventional jobs. In an Oct. 9 LinkedIn post, Srinivasan noted that the number of people listing “Founder” in their LinkedIn profiles rose nearly 23% over the past year.

“The program is focused on helping them learn how to build a business,” he wrote. “Not because we believe everyone should become an entrepreneur, but because people are trying new ways to find economic independence in an uncertain world.”

The appetite for entrepreneurship extends beyond LinkedIn's own platform. In a survey of 3,000 American adults, Intuit QuickBooks found that a third planned to start a business or side hustle this year, up from the 17% who said the same a year earlier. A separate survey of 1,051 new business owners conducted last year by payroll company Gusto found that half—51%—cited building financial stability or a future asset as a motivation for starting their businesses, up from 42% in 2024. Taken together, the platform data and the independent surveys point to growing interest in business ownership at a time when conventional hiring has slowed.

Srinivasan hopes to scale the Academy internationally and offer it at an affordable price to workers outside of LinkedIn, writing that “figuring this out is integral” to the company's mission. The company has not announced when enrollment will open to the public or what it will charge. Those two details—timing and price—remain the open questions for a program that, for now, exists only inside LinkedIn, where participation is free.

“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.”

A business school without degrees

LinkedIn is not alone in piloting a different approach to helping people start businesses outside traditional credentialing. 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 invested $42 million in a college alternative, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will offer 50 students courses in subjects such as AI inference engineering along with 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. The company's 2026 labor market report showed that U.S. job postings requiring AI literacy skills rose 70% year over year.

Srinivasan wrote that AI is also making it easier for employers to evaluate candidates' actual work—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.

But employers have not necessarily abandoned traditional credentials. 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 the 11,300 roles analyzed. Because so few roles dropped those requirements, however, 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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.