What's New? LinkedIn Learning
Oct 24, 2016
LinkedIn Learning has officially opened its virtual doors a year and a half after LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com. With more than 9,000 courses and 25 new courses added every week, LinkedIn Learning is aiming to be the preferred eLearning portal to close the global economy’s skills gap. This focus attributes itself perfectly to LinkedIn’s vision of developing the world’s first economic graph.
To start, LinkedIn Learning is offering its courses in English, but Spanish, French, Japanese and German are in the development queue.
“Learning and development has become one of our most important priorities. Increasingly predictions of tech displacing workers are coming to fruition. The idea that you can study a skill once and have a job for the rest of your life—those days are over.” Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn
As of the publishing of this post, LinkedIn Learning is available to individuals and organizations with 5+ employees.
Individual access to LinkedIn Learning.
As an individual LinkedIn member, you can access LinkedIn Learning via two ways:
-
Free LinkedIn members can pay $29.99 per month to access LinkedIn Learning (or save $5 per month if you subscribe annually)
-
Business Plus & Executive Premium Subscribers have access to LinkedIn Learning included in their memberships
Have you used your free trial of LinkedIn Premium? If not, give it a try and get access to LinkedIn Learning while you are at it. Make sure you also know the other features you have access to with your Premium subscription so that you can make the best use of the trial.
To access LinkedIn Learning from LinkedIn.com, simply hover over Interests and click on Learning from the drop down menu. LinkedIn Learning will populate in a new window. I recommend bookmarking this page so you can easily access it in the future.
LinkedIn Learning wants to recommend the courses best suited for you. So, it is recommended that you manually add skills and subjects that are most important to you.
Topics are accessed via the top right corner of LinkedIn Learning and are divided into three main categories: Business, Creative, and Technology.
Upon completion of a course, LinkedIn Learning will give you the opportunity to add the course and associated skills to your profile.
You can also add this information manually later. Another option is to share with your network via a posted update that you completed the course. The interface is incredibly intuitive and allows you to see courses in progress, saved courses, completed courses, and the skills you have selected as important to you to develop.
As one of LinkedIn’s ten mobile apps, you can also install the LinkedIn Learning mobile app to have quick access to tutorials when you are on the go.
Note: As of the publishing of this post, Sales Navigator does not include access to LinkedIn Learning. Don’t agree with that? Tell LinkedIn via the feedback button on the bottom right corner of your LinkedIn.com account.
Company access to LinkedIn Learning.
Companies are not only vying to attract extraordinary talent, they are also competing to retain the current top talent they have today. LinkedIn Learning can be the new differentiator between who is staying and who is going to your organization.
All content is curated and conveniently accessible. Here is a current list of the content library within LinkedIn Learning for organizations.
Why should organizations consider using LinkedIn Learning?
· Keeping your team’s skills current to stay competitive
· Create customized learning paths that fit what your team needs
· Monitor adoption, engagement and progress via reporting tools
Which groups are a good fit for LinkedIn Learning?
· Entire companies and teams
· Higher education and libraries
LinkedIn Learning appears to be a great launch for LinkedIn with tremendous potential to truly make an impact on the professionals and organizations that embrace it.
Have you tapped into it? What do you think? Follow us on LinkedIn and drop a comment to let us know.
