Microsoft to place 50,000 people in jobs through LinkedIn

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it aims to place 50,000 people in high skilled tech jobs in a push through its professional networking site LinkedIn to boost the labour market and employees affected by the pandemic.

The jobs will be in what Microsoft calls its “ecosystem” of companies that use or help sell its products.

It will partner with nonprofit groups that help people learn new skills to place those 50,000 workers over the next three years.

The program will focus on the US but will expand to other countries in 2022.

Already in 2020, LinkedIn made free many of its paid digital skills training courses to help those who had become unemployed due to the coronavirus crisis.

LinkedIn said it will extend the free courses until the end of this year with an aim to get 25m people to try them out. As of Tuesday 30.7m have tried the courses.