Helping over half a million people in the UK learn digital skills

Three months ago, in the midst of economic turbulence brought on by the global pandemic, Microsoft and LinkedIn launched an ambitious skills initiative to help 25 million people around the world gain critical digital skills for free before the end of 2020. Our goal was to help those who have found themselves in challenging employment circumstances to develop new skills that employers are looking for, and to help them find and secure their next job.

With the latest ONS figures indicating that around 1.4 million people in the UK are out of work, and that figure likely to increase significantly when the furlough scheme comes to an end in late October, this goal is more important than ever.  

Today, I’m excited to share an initial update on our progress, and while there is clearly more work to be done, we’re off to a strong start. Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub have collectively reached more than 10 million people around the world, including over half a million people in the UK, who have turned to our free online learning courses at opportunity.linkedin.com since we launched the initiative at the end of June. 

The UK has the third highest number of people engaging with our courses globally, with some of our most popular LinkedIn Learning courses focusing on skills that will help people move into software development, customer service and data analyst roles. We know from LinkedIn’s data that these roles are in-demand by employers today, they pay a good wage, require skills that can be learned online and are well-positioned to continue to be in-demand in the future.  

To help these free online learning courses reach more people, we have also partnered with the Department for Education so that people can access them through The Skills Toolkit. 

Over the past few months, we’ve also seen high engagement with our soft skill learning courses. These essential skills, like collaboration, empathy, problem solving and creativity, are essential to being successful at your job. Soft skills are highly valued by companies today and have grown in importance in recent years. The most popular soft skill courses globally include: 

1. Master In-Demand Professional Soft Skills: on developing resilience, building your emotional intelligence, and embracing unexpected changes.
2. Diversity Inclusion and Belonging for All: to learn skills on confronting bias, communicating across cultures, and skills for inclusive conversations.
3. Finding a Job During Challenging Economic Times: to learn skills on recovering from a layoff, digital body language, and recession-proof career strategies.

In addition to our free learning courses, we’ve also made available other free tools and resources to help people in their job search: 

• LinkedIn’s Job Search Guide - This guide offers tips and guidance on how to put your best foot forward when you’re looking for a new job. It includes helpful advice on how to build your LinkedIn profile, stand out to recruiters and potential employers, and start your job search.
• #OpenToWork: We recently launched a new feature called “Open to Work” - a simple photo frame that sits on your LinkedIn profile and signals to your network and recruiters that you’re open to new employment opportunities. Since we launched the feature in June, more than 2 million people have used it globally, and we’ve found that members that do receive 40% more recruiter InMails and 20% more messages from their community. 
• UK companies that are hiring: LinkedIn’s News team have been regularly collating a list of companies that are hiring 50+ roles across different industries. In addition to finding roles through LinkedIn’s Job Search, this list is a helpful starting point and may give you inspiration for the type of companies and roles you may be interested in applying for. 
• Interview Prep: To help people feel confident when they get to the interview phase, our interview preparation tools can help. Powered by Microsoft AI, our tools give you real-time feedback on your practice interview answers. They can help you learn more about your speech patterns, highlight any filler words that you may be using, and help improve your responses to common interview questions. 

I hope our learning courses, job search tools and resources are helpful to either you or someone you know. I look forward to sharing more updates on our commitment to this initiative and helping more people build their skills in the coming months. 

For anyone who hasn’t had the opportunity to explore our learning courses, I encourage you to take a look at opportunity.linkedin.com.