LinkedIn is looking to boost its professional education presence once again with the expansion of its professional Learning Hub, launched in beta back in April, to more organizations.
The Learning Hub enables businesses to provide professional development opportunities to their employees, and uses LinkedIn’s data insights to help highlight relevant skills path and career development opportunities.
As explained by LinkedIn at launch:
“Learning Hub has all of the capabilities of a traditional LXP, aggregating all of a company’s learning resources, but it’s so much more. It draws on 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, empowering customers with richer skill development insights, personalized content, and community-based learning.”
The new expansion, announced in a webcast hosted by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, will see more organizations given access to the platform, while LinkedIn is additionally making 40 courses available, free of charge, to help boost take-up of the training opportunity.
The free courses will be focused on developing elements of the modern workplace, including adapting to hybrid arrangements, staff management in the evolving work environment, and tips on returning to physical offices. LinkedIn will be hoping that by making these courses available for free, that will see increased take-up of the Hub, which will then facilitate increased reliance on its professional education tools among more organizations, further expanding its presence in the career development space.
The longer-term view is that, eventually, LinkedIn will look to charge organizations for access to the Learning Hub, providing another revenue stream for the company. Initially, the Hub is being made available to LinkedIn Learning Pro users for free, but over time, LinkedIn will evaluate when to start charging for access, and how it can build that into its broader LinkedIn Learning platform for expanded development.
In addition, and as noted by TechCrunch, LinkedIn’s also looking to link the tool back into its broader recruitment offerings, with the professional development opportunities highlighted then 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 big step in broadening LinkedIn’s horizons in this respect, and while it won’t impact regular LinkedIn users, specifically, it will add more data to LinkedIn’s already unmatched professional knowledge banks, and add another way for it to improve its broader offerings in this respect.
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