LinkedIn Learning Insights: The Top 10 Courses Driving Skills in 2025
Written by Senior Program Manager, Stephanie Evans
What we learn reflects what matters in our work. As we close out the year, we’re sharing the Top 10 LinkedIn Learning courses (unlocked through Dec 31), and revealing the trends that will shape 2026 and beyond.
A few themes emerged clearly from the data. AI continues to dominate, as it has since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, but that's only part of the picture. Foundational skills remain critical, and the real opportunity lies in balancing new tools with the human skills that bring them to life.
Top Course data is based on LinkedIn Learning data and was compiled by LinkedIn Associate Content Analyst Ayoub Manouche and Content Analyst Nathaniel Liganor in partnership with Senior Program Manager Stephanie Evans on the LinkedIn Learning team. We used Active Learners (AL) to rank courses. Longer methodology below.
Top 10 Courses Overall 2025
Note: these courses have been unlocked for free access to all members through December 31, 2025.
In both 2024 and 2025, AI courses made up half of our Top 10. Foundational titles like What is Generative AI?, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Introduction to Prompt Engineering for Generative AI held their Top 10 spots from 2024 to 2025.
We’re seeing that learners are progressing beyond AI theory to put knowledge into practice, applying AI to real workflows and everyday challenges.
Our AI Framework maps the AI learner journey across five stages — from understanding to applying, building, and ultimately maintaining complex AI systems. In 2025, the momentum is squarely in the “applying” stage, especially where Microsoft Copilot takes the lead in our courses released this year. Courses focused on improving productivity and workflows reflect a broader trend of learners moving beyond “what AI is” to “how AI works for me.”
For more than a decade, Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365) has held a steady spot in our Top 10, with Power BI Essential Training and Python Essential Training close behind. These powerful technologies remain indispensable, and as AI expands what's possible with these tools, learners are eager to deepen their skills and keep pace with new features.
Meanwhile, the enduring popularity of Project Management Foundations underscores a timeless truth: coordinating complex processes and people toward shared goals is a skill that never goes out of style.
Alongside these foundational skills, human skills remain table stakes. In our Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career, 79% of global professionals told us there’s no replacement for human intuition—even as AI accelerates. And LinkedIn research shows that professionals with soft skills can get promoted up to 8% faster.
Our Human Skills in the Age of AI Framework outlines how emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking, adaptability, creativity, and decision-making aren’t just nice-to-have, they’re what make professionals stand out in an AI-driven world. Communication, in particular, has risen to the top. Communication Foundations surged into the Top 10 in 2025 with 54% year-over-year growth, signaling that the ability to connect and collaborate is top of mind.
Fresh in 2025: New Courses Making Waves
Looking at titles published this year, we’re seeing that learning isn’t just about upskilling in tools, it’s about finding the balance with our unique humanity. While AI-powered courses soared, human skills like communication and adaptability held their ground.
Professionals aren’t necessarily choosing between tech and human skills, but instead investing in both to work smarter and adapt to the evolving world of work.
Our analysis didn’t stop at course rankings. We also looked at learner segments. We compared Enterprise learners using company subscriptions to Premium learners who join for personal reasons like career advancement, job search, or entrepreneurial needs. We saw more similarities than differences.
When comparing learner behavior across different personas, namely Enterprise (those who learn through their company) and Premium (those who pay for their own subscriptions), the top skills look very similar (Generative AI, Project Management, Power BI, and Excel).
While we expected our Premium learners to focus more on jobseeking and networking courses, the top courses were instead very similar to Enterprise learners. A top course unique to Premium was LinkedIn Premium Quick Tips by Garrick Chow, which helps Premium subscribers get the most out of their subscription.
For Urgent Job Seekers (members who have applied to at least one job once a day on average in the past 4 weeks), SQL Essential Training by Walter Shields stood out as a top course, showing these learners are actively pursuing immediate employability through hard technical skills. Their learning behavior suggests engaging with courses that align with job-required skills.
Core upskilling to work efficiently or land a job remains a top priority among learners of all types. To that end, we took a look at our top Professional Certificates. These curated learning paths and assessments validate upskilling at a deeper level and can be shared to LinkedIn profiles.
Professional Certificates bring together curated courses and assessments to help learners build expertise and validate understanding. Because these are designed as a stepping stone towards a new role, we see a more diverse list of topics mapping to popular career paths like project management and business analysis along with more tech-focused roles like System Administration and Data Analysis.
We noticed the top professional certificates skewed towards our unlocked certificates (those in front of our paywall), so we broke the list into two: unlocked and locked.
Top 5 Unlocked Professional Certificates
Top 5 Locked Professional Certificates
We’ve explored what shaped learning in 2025, but the story doesn’t end here. What skills will rise, and how will AI and human capabilities continue to intersect? Our Content Strategy Leadership team shares a glimpse into what’s ahead for 2026 and beyond.
Brandi Shailer, Senior Manager of AI Content Strategy:
The conversation has shifted. The last few years have centered around learners and organizations trying to get a footing on what is AI and what does one even need to learn. Our AI Upskilling Framework helped navigate those moments as we separated the steps of the AI upskilling journey from fluency to practice to mastery.
Today, we know one thing is undeniably true: no matter your role, level, or comfort with technology, taking the next step isn’t optional — it’s critical to your (and your company’s) success. Workers from the shop floor to the C-suite are digging into how to apply AI to increase their personal and professional productivity. To support learners with getting hands on, we’ve added 50 new Build with AI and No Code Required courses. The real transformation happens after the aha moment, when someone applies what they've learned to their unique context.
In 2026, I'm particularly watching the evolution of agentic AI across all job roles - the shift from using AI as a tool to deploying agents that act, decide, and collaborate.
Customer service reps are building agents that triage inquiries. Marketing Managers are creating agents that optimize campaigns in real time. If you’re ready to learn something new, I’m excited about experiences like Everyday AI: 15 Practical Skills to Build AI Confidence (building off our October 10-in-10 AI Challenge success), which help you jump in, experiment, and build. The future isn't waiting, and neither should you.
Megan Leatham, Senior Manager of Business Content Strategy:
AI may be changing the tools, but it’s our human strengths that are shaping the future. Communication, leadership, teamwork, problem solving, and adaptability top today’s skill demand list. These are the skills helping us collaborate, navigate change, and lead with emotional intelligence. They’re places where machines fall short.
With all the changes we’ve seen in the past year, employers see that success is dependent on more than mastering tools. It’s about building trust, sparking deeper thinking, and staying resilient. Human skills complement AI rather than compete with it, helping ensure innovation stays grounded in emotional intelligence, ethics, and real-world context.
The leaders making an impact are the ones leading with a human-centered approach. People look to leaders for clarity, connection, and stability and these are directly tied to engagement and performance. It’s intentional leadership: building trust, driving engagement, and keeping teams moving through change.
In 2026, those who thrive will be the ones who pair technical fluency with strong human skills. The future of work isn’t just automated. It’s deeply human.
Mary Treseler, Director of Content Strategy:
The nature of learning is fundamentally evolving. Learners no longer expect passive content consumption, they want experiences that integrate hands-on practice, cohort-based collaboration, direct access to credible experts, and meaningful assessments that validate capability.
Most critically, they expect to learn in the flow of work, not in isolation from it.
This shift demands we meet learners where they are with relevant, timely experiences that fit seamlessly into their daily workflows.
In a world where knowledge is ubiquitous and content is instant, credibility has become our differentiator. Our commitment is to connect learners with practitioners who've done the work, solved real problems, and can teach with authority because in an age of infinite information, trust and relevance matter more than ever.
Shea Hanson, Director of Global Content Strategy:
AI is pushing learning to evolve, and not by replacing what exists today, but rebalancing it.
Learning content will move from off-the-shelf to a flexible blend of instruction, practice, and feedback.
This shift of adaptive and co-created experiences will become the default. Adaptive learning meaning the content is personalized to the learner, and co-created meaning AI can help generate relevant practice, set goals, and real-time adjustments to help learners build skills. Our strategy is to evolve with these changes, and design learning content that can flex with the different roles video, audio, practice, and text will play in this AI learning future.
In retrospect, 2025 was a year of balance between AI skills and uniquely human abilities. Learners didn’t just chase trends, they invested in adaptability, communication, and leadership alongside tools that help them work smarter. This dual focus shows that the future of learning isn’t about choosing between technology and human skills, but more about leaning into both. As we move into 2026, we predict professionals who combine technical fluency with human insight will lead the way.
This Top 10 Courses list for 2025 is just the beginning. We’ll continue to track what matters most to learners and share insights that help you plan for the future. Watch for our next deep dive in February on our AI-powered Role Plays and how they’re transforming skill-building.
Methodology
This analysis evaluates learning engagement using Active Learners as the primary performance measure. An Active Learner has spent time consuming content in a given 7 day period.
We analyzed all-time top course titles in 2025 and compared their performance to 2024 to identify year-over-year shifts in learner demand. To surface emerging trends, we also examined the most popular courses published in 2025 to understand early traction and net-new skill areas.
Weekly engagement is aggregated to the course-year level to compute average and median weekly AL. Courses must have at least four active weeks within a year to be included.
The analysis compares engagement across Consumer and Enterprise learners, as well as key learner personas within those segments, to highlight differences in learning priorities. For high-level rankings, multiple versions of the same course are combined to reflect total course performance; segment-level analyses evaluate individual course versions.
In addition to individual courses, we analyzed Professional Certificates, which consist of multi-course learning pathways culminating in an assessment and credential. Certificate performance is normalized using daily starts to account for differing launch dates.
Insightful ☑️
Balanced tech + human skills win. Most valuable course lately: a hands-on automation track tied to real workflows. Next up: Project Management Foundations. What course surprised you most this year?
Great thanks for sharing this vital information .
Bottom line, continuous learning never gets old.
I see it slightly differently regarding upskilling balance. Another angle to consider is how integrating AI ethically enhances communication skills along career development journeys for lasting impact.