Helping People Build In-Demand Skills with Expanded Access to Professional Certifications

In the face of an uncertain macroeconomic climate, the ability to learn and showcase in-demand skills is critical to helping people get a foot in the door with a new company or finding a new role within their organization. For many professions, certifications have emerged as key to this, with the number of people on LinkedIn who've added certifications to their profile increasing 44% over the last two years. Today, we’re expanding access to certifications by partnering with leading third-party providers like IBM, Meta, and Oracle to help more people discover their certification content on LinkedIn. 

Partnering with Meta, Oracle and more to expand professional certification offering

Over the last few years, we have offered learners a variety of ways to prove their skills, including earning academic credit toward a degree; continuing education units to maintain certain professional licenses; and certification preparation programs to demonstrate a high level of skill in a certain industry. 

Today, we’re further expanding access to certifications by partnering with notable third-party providers including IBM, Meta, and Oracle, to help learners discover certification preparation content directly from the source.

From robust course content related to cloud infrastructure to digital marketing, learners will now be able to easily build skills directly from credible providers and showcase their certifications on their LinkedIn profile to stand out. And certification providers gain a new way to broaden the audience for their content to our 850M+ members. 

“With this partnership, millions of people will discover Oracle Cloud certifications and enhance their cloud skills with role-based learning paths,” said Damien Carey, senior vice president of Oracle University, “We’re excited about the continued collaboration with LinkedIn to empower more learners with expert-led digital training.” 

Acquiring EduBrite to further our skills-first vision

Earlier this year, we gave members the ability to associate the skills listed on their profile to their education, jobs or the certifications they’ve earned. We also brought skills to the forefront in LinkedIn Recruiter, so hirers can easily search and filter for candidates who best match their skill requirements. 

Our recent acquisition of EduBrite, a platform that specializes in creating and hosting professional certifications and assessments, further expands our product offering to better serve the needs of trusted, industry leading certification providers. 

By integrating their rigorous certification assessment engine into LinkedIn Learning, more certification providers will be able to promote, create, and extend the reach of their content. And our members will have the ability to build even more in-demand skills and demonstrate their proficiency to their network and to recruiters.

Joining forces with Microsoft to help learners transition into fast-growing, technical roles

Today’s announcement builds on LinkedIn’s ongoing investment in products and partnerships that help job seekers build and demonstrate their skills, and employers identify the skill qualifications of a candidate. 

Over the past two years, the global skills initiative partnership between LinkedIn and Microsoft has helped tens of millions of people learn skills that in-demand positions require through free access to curated content. 

We surpassed our goal of helping 250,000 companies make a skills-based hire in 2021 through new and existing hiring products – empowering more than 400,000 companies to make a skills-based hire that year. 

In the next couple of months, LinkedIn will partner with Microsoft’s Skills for Jobs program to create the next chapter of our global skills initiative: certificates aimed at helping workers and job-seekers transition into the digital economy. 

While we know it will take time to create a skills-first labor market, we are committed to expanding our partnerships, innovating our product, and collaborating with other organizations to create more equal access to opportunity through skills.

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