Of course, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been gigantic for people in general and for employment in the wider world. For lots of us, finding a job, finding someone who would fill a role, or just developing professionally is not the same as it used to be. No wonder that companies whose business models are focused on that space are changing too: LinkedIn-a Microsoft's social network service for the workplace-just announced a slew of news aimed at catching up with the times.
Launching a new Learning Hub for organizations that will offer professional development and other forms of training for employees. And it is offering 40 courses for free to LinkedIn members specifically to address some of the changes afoot, like how to adjust to hybrid work; how to be a better manager in this new normal; how to return to the office and run facilities when they are spread beyond a building, including people's private homes. Lastly, it is also beginning to tinker with subtleties that people can use to list and search for job openings to account for such kinds of working conditions and more.

Previewed back in April of this year, and running in beta for a few months now, the Learning Hub is now being rolled out more generally. Today the Hub is being launched as part of a bigger event hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky as they discuss new trends in the world of work.

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For some context, LinkedIn has been long on education for years, with acquisitions like the remote learning platform Lynda dating back to 2015 that would bolster its own education strategy and position as a go-to platform for professional development; partnerships to bring in big chunks of third-party content-for example, when it added over 13,000 courses via third parties in 2018; and efforts to tie together the concept of skills development with professional profiles, running research and building interactive tools for its users.

Available now and free until October 9 are the series of courses launching today, useful for companies as some begin transitioning from working-at-home to in-office environments, but the larger product launch, The Learning Hub, is not altruistic in that longer journey. It is also being sold as a premium service for business users — existing LinkedIn Learning Pro users will be able to use it for free until July 2022, potentially longer, the company said. In addition to being a salient business, it is also connected to the company's bigger efforts to bring in more business-focused services and more engagement from HR departments in order to bolster one of its other main revenue drivers: recruitment.

A learning experience platform, often described as LXPs, LinkedIn's relaunching of its own learning hub will push it more closely into competition with 360Learning, Coursera for Business, Workday, Cornerstone, and all the other platforms used by organizations to handle their own in-house and third-party professional training content. Also, LinkedIn reports it's going to use both its employment trend data and AI to begin personalizing content both for organizations and users. But considering it is also a space in which many of those same HR teams can list jobs and source candidates makes it a much stickier experience-and one that may feel more cohesive at a time when everything else might feel more fragmented.

Another area worth noting regarding this matter is the new fields LinkedIn is introducing in its recruitment service. Recruiters can now indicate whether a job is remote, hybrid or onsite; jobseekers will also be soon allowed to indicate which of these it's looking for in a new role. Companies will also be in a position to begin self-reporting much more granular detail about the status of the company as it relates to vaccinations and so much more, and to let the world out there-by employees, partners, customers, interested others-know if your physical offices are open for business or not.

These are new fields, which are perhaps a little bit too silly or at least very specifically related to things about which we worry and live with today, but I think they're more important than that. They indicate what LinkedIN thinks-about, and perhaps many of us feel to be strong priorities in the way that we think about work today. This, in turn opens the door to how and if LinkedIn might consider other kinds of details in company and personal profiles, alongside details that could be used in recruitment. That is something the company has been working on for a little while already: in June it started to give users the option of adding pronouns to their profiles. All of which is pretty important, because there are so many small companies and cries to the heavens for someone to dislodge LinkedIn from its throne. Which LinkedIn plays around with new formats and sunsets others, all signals that it is attempting to become more agile to counteract that.