How To Find The Best Linkedin Learning (Lynda) Courses?
You might be looking for the best LinkedIn Learning (Lynda) courses.
LinkedIn Learning provides a surfeit of online courses to enhance the skills of the students, professionals, business persons, and other types of learners. It offers programs related to business, technology, and creative skills. At the time of writing this article, its portfolio consisted of 15000+ courses.
With so many choices, it is somewhat challenging to find a good course that is most suitable for your needs. Although Linkedin Learning offers many good programs, you should study only from top courses.
In this article, you will find steps to search for top courses. After reading this article you will be able to shortlist a few good courses.
I would suggest you take their free trial as you read this article further. This way you will be able to easily follow the steps written in this article.
Click here to start your free trial
Steps to Find the Best Courses on Linkedin Learning (Lynda)
I. Choose a Topic that Interests You
You should start by choosing a topic that interests you. It could an in-demand topic or something that you are passionate about.
You can choose photography if you are keen to learn photography or you can choose topics like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science as these skills are being most sought after in the IT industry. However, if you are looking for a management role, you can go for Finance and Accounts.
Linkedin Learning has courses on almost all popular topics and it allows you to learn from all of them under a single subscription. So, if you want, you can pick as many courses as you like.
You can refer to the following figure that shows some of the popular high-level topics.
II. Browse by Category or Perform Search
Linkedin Learning provides courses under three broad categories viz. business, technology, and creative skills. Under these three broad categories, you will find multiple sub-categories.
After choosing a topic, you can browse through the subcategories to find suitable courses.
After selecting a sub-category, you can browse through all the results.
Simple browsing might show hundreds of courses and may not yield the right result, so you can try your hand at Search.
You can directly search on a topic if you have a specific course in your mind. A search can be independently performed even without browsing but it helps to narrow down the result by browsing.
The search option of the platform allows you to filter courses based on the keywords related to the skills, subjects, or software e.g. you can search ‘finance’ to find programs related to finance.
III. Refine Search Results
After you have selected a category/subcategory by browsing or found a list of courses by searching, you can further narrow down the results by applying filters.
Linkedin Learning provides following filters:
- Sort by – you can sort by any one of Best Match, View count, and Newest.
- Level – The platform supports three skill levels viz. Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.
- Type – The platform provides three types of viz. Course, Video, and Learning Path. A learning path is a great way to start learning if you are a beginner. A learning path includes a series of courses related to your chosen topic e.g. if courses for becoming a full-stack developer. Some learning paths =also provide to-do activities for mastering concepts and overcoming your doubts.
- Time to complete – You can filter a course based on the time required to complete it.
- Software – It will show the name of the software that are related to your chosen topic.
IV. Look for Trending Courses
Linkedin Learning shows a list of trending courses on popular topics. After browsing or searching, you can look at the trending courses.
It is possible that you may not find a suitable course among the trending courses. If that is the case you can go to the next step.
V. Look At the Course Statistics
Before joining a course, you should verify how many learners have enrolled in it and how many likes does it have.
A higher quantum of the learners and likes indicates that the course is likely to be good. If you are logged into your Linkedin profile, the platform will also tell you who among your connections has liked the course.
VI. Look at the Instructors Profile
Each course over the platform has an introduction to the instructor. You must read that introduction. The instructor having rich experience will be able to facilitate the learners and will give better insight to the learners. The methodology and approach of such the instructor will create a productive learning duration.
VII. Go through the Course Description and Curriculum
You must ascertain that the course is aligned with your interests before enrolling in it. For this, you should go through the description of the course shortlisted by you. It will give you a brief introduction of the course. You should also check the course curriculum to understand what will you learn.
VIII. Look at the Deliverables
You must look out if quizzes, projects, and other assessments are available as part of the course. These will not only help you to evaluate your knowledge but also give you a practical overview of the subject.
IX. Look at Course Duration
Before taking a course, you should check its duration.
The duration should neither be too long nor too short. Longer courses are likely to exhaust you while shorter ones will not give you enough knowledge. You should enroll into a course whose length is suitable for the topic you have chosen.
Summary
LinkedIn Learning has plenty of courses in its library and they continuously add new ones. It provides good features to help you in your search but you must have a topic in your mind. To take full advantage of Linkedin Learning, you should be clear about your requirements and your goals.
I would suggest that you start with a free trial of Linkedin Learning, try out few courses, and then choose the ones you like.