Gone are the days when you had a job, performed as best you could and sat back smug in your cabin. Learning is a continuous process and the need to upgrade your skills and toe the line were never more demanding.
This is one area that LinkedIn wished to address when it made its debut into online learning after it took over Lynda.com last year. The professional networking site on Thursday launched LinkedIn Learning so individuals and organizations can keep up with new trends and developments within their fields of specialization.
The spread of courses offered is a mind boggling 9000 which were built on the content from the learning portal Lynda.com. “With more than 450 million member profiles and billions of engagements, we have a unique view of how jobs, industries, organizations and skills evolve over time. From this, we can identify the skills you need and deliver expert-led courses to help you obtain those skills. We’re taking the guesswork out of learning,” says Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content Products at LinkedIn.
The range of courses cover fields like coding and programming to writing and accounting. The courses are taught by industry experts and cover a wide range of business, creative and technical topics. In addition to English, members can also find courses in German, Spanish, Japanese and French.
LinkedIn tried a pilot programme with companies like Bertelsmann, Box, Ellie Mae, NBCUniversal and Viacom. “It provides great content and recommendations, all through a great user experience,” said Terence Morley, NBCUniversal director of talent development. “People wouldn’t be coming back unless the content and recommendations were good.”
Employees can choose the courses that they wish to sign up for or let HR managers recommend courses which let them track their employees’ progress through LinkedIn’s analytics. Online learning will be paired with messaging and chatbots, a service powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence.
The flip side is that new tech tools could displace jobs if employees don’t change the way they work. Tomorrow’s forays into robotics and artificial intelligence could lead to attrition – but nothing comes without a price. The stark reality is that the shelf life of a skill has diminished to less than five years.
As in grading diamonds where the four Cs are the parameters, the USPs of LinkedIn Learning use the three Cs to put it in a nutshell – Content, Curation and Convenience.
Content gives you a wide spectrum of subjects from technical to creative skills. Curation makes an employee feel his integral involvement in his own progress because of the intensely personalized approach in the system.
Ability to access the program from anywhere and any device adds that high degree of convenience. You can read, listen and watch when you are ready to do so. Regimentation is a word that does not find favor here.
To ride the wave and stay on top has been made so much easier and the challenges and frontiers of new domains beckon.
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