How To Find The Best Pluralsight Courses? [2021]

It is difficult to answer what some of the the best Pluralsight courses are. A course that is good for one person may be worthless for another.

Pluralsight is an online learning platform that offers technology related courses. At the time of writing this article, it had 6500+ courses in its portfolio. I have not reviewed all the courses. It is practically impossible to do so but, in my opinion, most of the Pluralsight courses are very good.

Pluralsight authors are incentivized to make good programs so you can expect only good offerings from this online learning platform.

Now, I do not know which all programs will be right for you as each person has his/her own preferences but I have devised a method to discover the top most programs offered by Pluralsight. By using this method, you will be able to identify the finest or greatest programs that are offered by the Pluralsight. You will be able to shortlist the best courses on Python, Java, Data Science, Javascript or any other technology that you might want to learn.

I have written this post to help you find the courses that are most suitable for you. Read on for knowing a step by step method to to discover the top rated courses of Pluralsight.

Before proceeding, I would recommend you to take free trial of Pluralsight. This way you will be able to easily follow the steps written in this post.

Table of Contents

9 Steps to Find the Best Pluralsight Courses

1. Choose your Primary Skill

Pluralsight provides a lot of options. It offers courses under many different categories. Each of these categories has hundreds of courses and it is not not worthwhile to pursue everything.

You should choose a technology that will help you in building your career. e.g. if you are a IT ops professional and are working on AWS then learning Azure may not be helpful. Similarly, learning C# would not be useful for a Python programmer.

You should enroll into courses that will upgrade your existing knowledge & skills.

2. Look at the Industry Trends

The landscape of technology industry changes very fast. It is always worthwhile to invest into new technologies along with gaining expertise in what you already know.

The technology trends changes every 4-5 years. What is vogue today may not be required after a few years. E.g. Delphi was a hot technology in the beginning of 2000’s but it has non-existent demand today.

You should keep yourself updated about the latest trends in the technology industry. One way to do this is to subscribe to newsletters from indyustry publications like CIO.com and Techrepublic.com. Another way is to look at the Google Trends.

Google Trends will tell which technologies are seeing a upward trend in demand and which have a downward trend. Below is a screenshot of search trends of five major programing languages.

You will that, over the last five years, the searches for:

Java, Javascript, and PHP have reduced.
Python has increased.
C++ has remain steady.

You should choose courses that are focused on future and help you in long run.

3. Check Salary Data

It is important to look at the future technology trends but it is also important to look at the current salaries in a particular technology. It is possible that a technology may have a good demand but the pays might be low. You can check sites like Glassdoor and Payscale to determine the current remuneration in a particular technology in your geographic region.

4. Determine Complementary Technologies

After choosing your primary skills and learning about the technology trends, you should find the technologies that will expand your primary skill. Nowadays, employers seek individuals who have broad range of knwoledge and skills. E.g. if you are a software developer, knowing Java might not be enough. Yow would need to understand other technologies like Javascript, SQL, HTML, and CSS to write a complete program.

5. Ascertain your Proficiency Level

After determining what you want to learn, you should focus on ascertaining your current proficiency level. You can use Pluralsight’s skill IQ to check your current skill level – are you a beginner, proficient, or expert.

Pluralsight offers a feature called learning paths. The paths include sequence of courses from beginner level going up to expert level. Once you have determined your current skill level, you can choose specific courses or entire path to polish your skills.

6. Read Author’s Profile

Once you have shortlisted the courses, you can further analyze them to check if they are suitable for you. You can start by checking the author’s profile. A course from an experienced author is likely to be good.

Although, I think this step is not really required, you should still check author’s profile.

You can check the following things in the author’s profile:

How much experience does the author have?
How many courses has the author published?
What is the average course rating of the author?

You can use the above parameters to determine if the author has been publishing good courses. Just spend a few minutes on author’s bio to check if the course shortlisted by you is good or not.

Note: All Pluralsight author’s are experienced and knowledgeable Pluralsight carefully scrutinizes the author’s credentials before giving them an opportunity to create a course. Furthermore, authors’ incentives are aligned to the popularity of their courses so they tend to create great courses.

7. Check Course Content and Duration

You should browse through the course outline to understand if the topics will be beneficial for you or not.

Typically, longer courses provide more in-depth information so try to find a course with a lot of sub-topics and longer duration videos. For example, the two courses shown in the above figure are for 1 hour 5 minutes and 1 hour 51 minutes respectively.

It is better to avoid a very short course that do not have much content.

8. Check Course Description and Rating

You should read the description of the course and check its rating before enrolling into a course. In fact, the ratings should be one of the key factors for choosing a course.

In general, higher rating indicates that the course is good but you should also check number of students who have given the rating. If the number is too small, for example in single digits, then the course might not be worthy. It is also possible that a new course might not have enough ratings.

9. Check Preview

Before subscribing to any course just have a look at the preview video of the course. The preview could give you details about the author’s teaching style and what all will you get from the course.

Final Thoughts – The Top Programs of Pluralsight

In my opinion, most courses on Pluralsight are excellent. They are developed by experts in their respective fields and then reviewed by peers multiple times.

Furthermore, incentives of the course authors are linked to the popularity of their courses. So the authors take extra pain to create extremely good programs.

However, all courses are not created equal. Some are better than the others. The above-mentioned points could help you in selecting the best courses on Pluralsight. You should use all the points; applying only a few of them might not lead to the best results. If you do it, you would be able to enroll into the best courses.

As I suggested earlier, you can start with Pluralsight’s free trial. It will help you in shortlisting a few courses before you buy Pluralsight’s subscription.