Pluralsight Skills vs. Udacity

Awesome tool for teams looking to gain new skills or refine and update existing skills. I love the convenience of using this tool for recertification credits (i.e. PMP). Instead of identifying which classes I need to take, I can identify my interests and have recommendations presented for what paths I should take. It is a really helpful tool to create ladders for my team to transition from one role into the next. I think this is going to be a really beneficial tool.

Incentivized

It's suited well to support on developing a project and following a set curriculum to get things and material in order. Also it has the idea of a nano-degree as the mini-certification to focus on working through a program over a course of a few months. It's more of an interactive course and best for having access for a set period of time. It helps to prepare well for exams but less beneficial when it comes to more applications I find, and should not be used to supplant any resource, but to use in conjunction with.

Incentivized

• Pluralsight has hundreds of authors that are constantly producing new content, which is valuable for the tech industry that is constantly moving at a brisk pace.
• Many content authors are respected leaders in the topic they're presenting. You are able to trust that their content is thorough and authentic.
• Niche expert-level topics are presented in a curated video format which is difficult to find anywhere else.

Incentivized

• Courses are very high quality and updated regularly.
• Instructors and Mentors are available for live tutoring.
• Relevant projects are assigned in order to keep learning material fresh and top of mind.

Incentivized

• Companies don't change technologies in their products often. For example a product that was built on AngularJS is still viable and the company may have no plans to upgrade it. Pluralsight could do a better job of providing new courses on technology that's still useful, though somewhat dated; like AngularJS for example.
• Pluralsight has a bad habit of throwing all their courses in a large bucket. For example, when I log-in and look to see what new I often have to wade through courses on tools that a web artist or designer would use. I wish Pluralsight would categorize course and let us (their customers) flag what types of videos we wanted to see, or better yet exclude from our view.
• Years ago, Pluralsight would let its customer download the courseware and that was great. I was disappointed when they stopped this feature.
• I'd love to see more course where the goal is to build a particular type of software. For example, lets have one where you build a blog using ASP.NET and deploy it to Azure. Let have one where you build a survey application, etc. Learning technologies is great, but I'd love to see courses where the goal is to build a particular type of application.

Incentivized

• Slack channels were a little disorganized.
• The prices are a little bit higher compared to other platforms.
• Some courses and tooling for the projects were outdated.

Incentivized

Great product and service so far. Awesome new content almost every week.

Incentivized

Very, VERY easy to use.

Incentivized

For the most part, site usability is great. I would say the only shortcoming from my end was when I needed support. Support responses were typically very slow, the few times I needed it.

Incentivized

Each feedback I do for them, I get no response. Minimal communication and followups!

I didn't personally have any issues with the program, but scheduling time to review the final project was easy, and the assistant was pleasant to work with.

Incentivized

Before using Pluralsight, staff was using YouTube to help them with developing certain aspects of their knowledge. However, YouTube is much less structured/organized than Pluralsight. Pluralsight has a very wide offering of courses and it has lot of good content. One quick search and we can get started.

Incentivized

I combined my learning from various platforms and did on exclusively reply on any one. However, the free courses in Udacity lacks the comprehensiveness as Coursera.

Incentivized

• One positive impact is it has kept our employees engaged in the material they work with every day. Instead of becoming stagnant and complacent, they are actively searching out ways to develop skills and do more with the tools available to them.
• It saves money when it comes to offering training and development opportunities company-wide. It would be much more costly to invest in specialized training for that number of employees.
• One potential negative is the amount of company time spent on coursework over work responsibilities. A balance must be struck and individuals should be encouraged to explore the training on their own time.

Incentivized

• I am already in a great position as a CTO with a great company. I hope to be able to build some new technology with what I am learning, but I haven't applied any of it yet to my own real-world problems. I will though.

Incentivized