Learners’ Edition: AI-powered Coaching, Professional Certifications + Inspiring conversations about mastering your learning & speaking skills

Every few weeks, I share new products and experiments that seem to be working — or not!— to give you some ideas for what we’re building, why we’re building it, and how we operate; I’d love your feedback on everything! – Tomer?

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As we say farewell to 2023 and step into 2024, I hope you will take the time to reflect on your professional journey and the new paths you aspire to create.?

As you do so, I have one suggestion -- integrate learning into it. If there is something certain about the future, it’s that our jobs and careers are changing at an unprecedented pace. Even if you are not planning to change jobs, your job is changing (we expect that by 2030, the skills people need to do their job are expected to change by 65% (!)). AI will redefine how we think of jobs and career paths, and it will place more emphasis on skills rather than degree or pedigree. While AI is leading the change, it will also fuel learning and create new ways to learn.?

For those of you who are interested to learn more about how AI is not just reshaping the products we build, but also revolutionizing our approaches to product development, I recommend a podcast I recently did with Gustav S?derstr?m (CPO & CTO at Spotify ), Scott Belsky (CPO & CSO at Adobe ), and Harry Stebbings (founder of 20VC ).

And now, on to our featured product updates. At LinkedIn, we are passionate about helping you get ahead in your career. In today’s edition, authored by Jill Raines , our Director of Product, we delve into these new product experiences, to help enrich your personal development. Whether you're looking to upskill, reskill, or simply expand your knowledge, our latest releases offer a treasure trove of opportunities.?

Wishing you a year of unparalleled growth and learning!

1. Your own AI-powered coaching

We're completely reimagining learning and how we connect people more directly with the ideas and experts that help them learn the skills they most need.

We often hear from learners that they can clearly articulate a problem they're facing, but that they are overwhelmed with how to navigate all the content out there.

This is why we’re excited for you to try our new AI-powered coaching on LinkedIn Learning.?

Learners can go into LinkedIn Learning and ask a question or explain a challenge they are currently facing at work (we’re focusing on areas within Leadership and Management to start). AI-powered coaching will pull from the collective knowledge of our expansive LinkedIn Learning library and, instantaneously, offer advice, examples, or feedback that is personalized to the learner’s skills, job, and career goals.?

What makes us so excited about this launch is we can now take everything we as LinkedIn know about people’s careers and how they navigate them and help accelerate them with AI. We recognize this is early and the world is moving fast, so trust, privacy and responsible AI are our top priorities as we learn and iterate.

2. Learn everyday…bite-by-byte?

One of the hardest parts about learning is finding the time to make it happen. We all want to learn every day, but work and life often get in the way. So, it shouldn’t be that you need to climb the entire mountain in a single journey (aka master the skill in one sitting… who has time for that?!)

We are breaking up the journey for you, so you can fit learning into your schedule. Watch short, engaging videos in an immersive personalized feed, and learn the skills you care about from the instructors and experts you trust—without distraction. Along the way, we’ve built in quick knowledge checks to assess your progress and streaks to help stay motivated.?

We’re testing the new experience first in the LinkedIn Learning mobile app (download and try it out!), and as we get more signals about the types of content and relevance that drive learning frequency, we’ll test this type of content in the LinkedIn feed. So, look out for more updates from us!

3. Learn exactly what you need to know for your next job

When looking for a new job, it’s often the time we think about refreshing our LinkedIn profiles. It’s also a time we can refresh our skills. And with skill sets for jobs having changed by 25% since 2015 – with the number expected to increase by 65% by 2030 – keeping our skills a step ahead is one of the most important things we can do to stand out.?

There are a couple of ways we’re making it easier to learn exactly what you need to know for your next job:?

1. When you set a job alert, in addition to being notified about open jobs, we’ll recommend learning courses and Professional Certificate offerings to help you build the skills needed for that role.
2. When you view a job, we recommend specific courses to help you build the required skills. If you have LinkedIn Learning access through your company or as part of a Premium subscription, you can follow the skills for the job, that way we can let you know when we launch new courses for those skills and recommend you content on LinkedIn that better aligns to your career goals.

4. Showcase your skills to hirers with Professional Certificates?

When trying to land a job, members need a way to signal they actually have the skill. One way to do this is through past work experience, another is Professional Certificates – with over 12M LinkedIn members already featuring credentials on their profiles today.

To earn a Professional Certificate, you can do coursework on LinkedIn Learning and score a 70% or higher on the end assessment. Then, you can add the Professional Certificate to your LinkedIn profile and associate it with specific skills as a way to provide context on where you learned the skill.

To date, we’ve launched 33 Professional Certificates from 15 providers, including Microsoft, Zendesk, Twilio, ServiceNow, and more. Meaning you can discover, earn and showcase your certificate all on LinkedIn.

If you are looking to check one out, our Microsoft's Gen AI Professional Certificate has been one of the most popular.? In combination with our 300 (and growing) AI course offering, it’s a one-stop-shop to build your expertise in all things Gen AI.

5. Advance your coding skills with hands-on practice

Tech skills are among the most in-demand and fastest changing today, and they can’t be mastered just by watching videos. Learners need space to practice, write code, get it wrong, and get feedback.

We’ve expanded our hands-on practice for tech skills, with sandboxes launched last year in partnership with GitHub Codespaces, and we’ve launched Code Challenges - on-platform interactive coding exercises in LinkedIn Learning with-real time feedback, powered by Coderpad. We’re starting with over 30 Code Challenge courses in 6 programming languages that can be used by experienced coders or beginners alike.?

It’s exciting that we can already see people investing more time learning when they use our hands-on practice features– returning to watch more content at a 60% higher rate than those who don’t use our practice tools.

Every day I’m amazed by the heart of the LinkedIn community and the incredible sense of purpose, passion, generosity, and humor that is showcased through conversations across the platform. I love seeing all the unique and inspiring posts－and I’m excited to share some of my favorites with you.??

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Blackstone (not to be confused with BlackRock ) decides to set an example on how to celebrate the holiday season (and their brand) with a great holiday video.

Thomas Wolf , co-founder of Hugging Face , shares his takeaways on a couple of breakthrough LLM benchmarking papers that were recently published.

Henryk Sarat , an engineer leader, shares his thoughtful approach for overcome stuttering and mastering your speech.

Joe Pompliano shares the economic breakdown of the partnership between 耐克 Golf and Tiger Woods and what steps should Tiger take next.

Allie K. Miller shares how personalized AI-led education is accelerating learning in this Austin based school, allowing students more time to develop life skills like public speaking and personal finance.

With deep gratitude,

Tomer