TrustRadius Insights for LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Comprehensive Database: Many users have praised the database of trainings on lynda.com, stating that it is great and comprehensive. They appreciate the wide range of topics covered, providing ample learning resources for different needs.
Accurate and Efficient Search Feature: The accurate and efficient search feature on lynda.com has been highly appreciated by users. It allows them to quickly find the specific courses or topics they are looking for, saving them time and effort in their learning journey.
Availability of Exercise Material: Users have found the availability of exercise material on lynda.com to be very helpful. Some reviewers mentioned that depending on the course, these exercises can greatly reinforce their learning experience and enable them to apply the concepts in a practical manner.
LinkedIn Learning is used a professional development tool to upskill team members across the business, including both entry-level roles right through to Senior Management. The learning is tailored to each individual to upskill in particular development areas that aim to enhance knowledge, skills and productivity in our workplace.
Pros
Easy-to-use platform
Ability to generate custom learning journeys
Accessible content, including visual, audible and written
Opportunities to consume both bite-sized and longer-form content
Cons
Divide longer videos into sectiosn to consume in parts
Better search features to filter/sort
Likelihood to Recommend
LinkedIn Learning is a fantastic tool to enhance your professional development and engage in meaningful content/topics. The mobile application allows the opportunity to consume content on-the-go and its ability to follow the text scripts of video allows for better accessibility.
We use LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) daily in our organisation to address micro-learning needs. As they have so many courses available on such a wide range of topics, it enables us to recommend courses to people who need development in a particular area. We also use it for our onboarding training and cyber security training.
Pros
Variety of courses available
Ability to assign courses to different groups
AI coach
Cons
More Australian content
Ability to create own content
Likelihood to Recommend
LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) is well suited to scenarios where we need to explain concepts to people in short form video content. It is great to assign pre-work before workshops or in person courses. We also use it each week in our company newsletter to highlight a skill they can learn.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Human Resources (201-500 employees)
I've been using LinkedIn Learning for years (I started with Lynda.com). The course information is always fantastic, and the instructors give me helpful insight into areas where I need help. I am a web designer, which has helped me improve in areas for use in my business. I highly recommend it!
Pros
Instructors are fantastic.
You can search for just about anything you want to learn.
I send clients here when they need to learn a topic.
Cons
How up to date are the courses.
Sometimes it's hard to understand the instructor if they have an accent.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great for learning business and technology. It is also good if you want to get a taste of a topic before you commit to taking an in-person class.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
I use LinkedIn Learning to create learning paths and assign quarterly trainings to employees. This product assists with keeping employees on track and in compliance with company policies as well as employee growth.
Pros
LinkedIn Learning has user friendly searching capabilities. It is very easy to find courses you are interested in.
LinkedIn Learning seamlessly updates training status in their system as well as our LMS.
LinkedIn Learning has a variety of reporting tools that are easy to use.
Cons
Terminated employees are not automatically removed from the system. It would be nice to eliminate this manual process
The interface with our LMS sometimes requires employees to have a personal profile as well as a professional profile. It would be more user friendly if the accounts could be combined.
It would be nice to have a chat feature for employees who need a quick response to general questions without having to read articles.
Likelihood to Recommend
LinkedIn Learning is well suited for ongoing, adhoc, refresher training, etc. In the same token, I don't think it's well suited for state specific compliance trainings.
VU
Verified User
Program Manager in Human Resources (501-1000 employees)
I use LinkedIn Learning, previously Lynda.com, to compliment my overall career development. I personally am a fan of LinkedIn Learning in comparison to some of the other providers in the market due to the expansive catalog of courses, articulate teachers, and thoughtfully curated content. It allows me to further my understanding of several different topics that pertain to my career.
Pros
Expansive Catalog of Courses
Articulate and Educated Instructors
Meaningful Content
Cons
Lack of Advanced and Professional Courses
Somewhat Outdated Content
Recommended/Next Up Content Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
I think LinkedIn Learning is an excellent choice for any professional looking to advance their understanding of topics that pertain to their career. There are courses for all levels of understanding with the opportunity to complete them in chronological order at your own pace. It makes learning a new subject, or becoming a subject matter expert, a breeze for working individuals who might not have the time or bandwidth to devote to a firmly structured learning regimen.
My organisation uses LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) to provide us courses and certifications for career growth, necessary compliance certifications and product expertise. I work in Sales and to me the most important aspect of LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) is that it provides short but comprehensive courses that explains a technical topic with ease and efficiency
Pros
Short courses
Multiple courses and topics to choose from
good recommendations
Cons
Trying to buy and cancel subscription is not easy
To check bills of our past payments you have to do multiple things to get there
They don't provide a dashboard with all current courses and progress
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited if you want to choose a course just for your understanding sake, it does not cover everything comprehensively. It has less hands-on projects and more of just theory lectures. But they do provide good examples and sometimes the instructors are good orators as well so they are very easy to understand.
LinkedIn Learning is used to learn emerging and used technologies in detail. It helps business by providing this platform to the resources so that they can learn the things directly and improve themself.
Pros
Course content is good
Short , Medium and long courses are available to learn
Certification on course completion which can be shared to showcase your skills
Cons
Topic or course based discussions
FAQ sections and way to get answers quickly from course creator
Adding more courses from other domains
Likelihood to Recommend
For example when organization is using Azure technology and new resource which is hired or existing resource who is not good in that, they can use LinkedIn Learning to learn this skill. It will be less appropriate in scenarios where an organisation has already have set courses available on their intranet site for resource improvement.
In my work we use Linkedin Learning for training, with shorter and faster courses.The subjects are current and the courses are easy to be done and with simple language.In our case I think we received many indications of courses which does not allow us to access all, but we have the advantage of being able to do them anywhere even on public transport for example.
Pros
Simple and didactic content
Easy access
Serves multiple people at the same time
Cons
the search for specific subjects could be expanded, facilitating access
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion this software is ideal for fast and short courses, I don't konw if this is is suitable for longer courses and in modules, do not know if didactics would be suitable, maybe it would become tiring
We used Linkedin Learning to help supplement soft skills learning for managers. Some teams, e.g. engineering, use it to augment technical skills for new graduates as well.
Pros
Up to date training content
Very personable videos with introductions
a lot of soft skills training
Cons
content varies from instructor to instructor
little control from corporate on what employees learn
Likelihood to Recommend
LinkedIn Learning is good for supplemental learning of soft skills and some technical skills. I wish that companies can curate the courses that are offered and ban certain courses where the content is not in line with the company culture or is not appropriate for the environment.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Human Resources (1001-5000 employees)
I have used Lynda.com since they first opened, prior to online course offerings. Their initial classes were delivered on CD-ROM and I was an early alpha and beta tester for them. Personally I continue to use their classes to get up to speed on new software. They no longer offer classes for legacy software versions, unfortunately, which is a terrible limitation of their usefulness to me. I also have used their classes to get a large non-profit team I work with up to speed on software we use collectively. I have frequently recommended Lynda.com to clients so we could work collaboratively with graphical assets. I have continued to subscribe because I loved the company - before it was acquired by LinkedIn. Now I'm on the verge of canceling.
Pros
They have progressively updated the interface for the video lessons, adding a transcript, and for some time they had several video window options. These were important because you frequently have to refer back and forth between the lesson segments, transcript, and video, which is an extra usability headache when you have to scroll constantly.
Their introductory "essential training" videos are generally quite good at getting an overview of software tools, functionality, and work flow.
Lynda.com specialized initially in DESIGN. She was the first person to author web design books oriented towards graphic designers instead of programmers. She often included videos with groundbreaking artists in their field.
Transcripts are an essential tool in the lessons. Once you've watched everything, there are bound to be things you need to refer to again, and the transcripts help because you don't have to watch each video again.
Cons
LinkedIn Learning has already made much of Lynda.com's content unusable. Where software lessons were once clearly indexed by company and title, now searches lead to every video segment that mentions a topic among all related software products. Meanwhile, it's often impossible to find courses when you know they exist. For example, Google and G-Suite courses were nearly impossible to find for some time.
LinkedIn's interface is already confusing and counter-intuitive. They've wrapped LinkedIn Learning into the existing over-cluttered interface, making it even harder to use effectively. As a company, they've also proven to be untrustworthy; when I first signed up for Linked In, they spammed everyone in my contact list, and there are lots of reports of them billing customers without their consent. I'm being forced to migrate to LinkedIn Learning, but the account migration doesn't work, and their tech support was clueless why.
Lynda.com was never terribly great for learning coding. Even if you buy the upper tier subscription with the exercise files, it can often be difficult to debug a problem when you're following an instructor onscreen. If there's something you're confused by, there's no way to ask a question for clarification. LinkedIn is even worse because it's trying to include every IT subject that certifications are available for, and they're weak on design software.
The class certificates are basically a joke. All you have to do to "earn one" is let all the videos in a course play through to the end. I think there may be comprehension questions thrown in for good measure, but I never found them to help comprehension or retention.
Just like the present site, LinkedIn targets everything towards corporate clients. A large majority of design professionals and creatives in general are contract workers and resent pop-up menus that don't even mention design among the potential departments or any related job titles. LinkedIn Learning is targeted towards IT support personnel, not creative software users.
Lynda.com was initially a family business. Together with Bruce Heavin, she offered easily accessible training for people without technical backgrounds. Now she's on the Forbes top 100 women list, valuing her at $310 million. Lynda.com went through a growth spurt that moved them from Ojai to Ventura, and in the process they became less and less personal. Support staff was still friendly, helpful, and responsive though. Few other businesses offered the ability to start and stop a subscription without any penalty. Now LinkedIn's purchase seems to be putting nails in the coffin. No longer is there phone support - only a chat window with uninformed people puzzled why they can't migrate [your] account.
Likelihood to Recommend
I've learned hundreds of software applications over the last several decades, and trained teams in offices and one-on-one. At one point, books and trade magazines were a great way to get up to speed with an application, but they've become less and less effective for getting started. Video lessons have some strengths; you can get a rapid overview of a program's capabilities and watch an experienced user using its tools efficiently. On rare occasions they'll even point out bugs that could trip you up, but I wish instructors shared more of those issues.
However, it takes a very self-motivated learner to sit through training sessions. Most people don't fit that category, and a subscription may end up gathering dust like a pandemic gym membership. My account is sometimes dormant for months, but then I'll be watching lessons continually the following month. I've often wondered if it was worth it for that reason. I have some friends that voraciously devoured class after Lynda.com class, and built successful careers on that training. But many others never use their account. It's helpful to consider whether you're a self-motivated learner. If not, it may not be the best format for you.
More complicated software often can't be adequately introduced in a several-hour-long series of videos. I found Final Cut Pro (7) hard to learn online, also Logic Pro. Other somewhat complicated programs like DVD Pro were a snap to learn, and I learned a lot about PHP and Actionscript programming from Lynda.com. Some web and graphics software is exceptionally explained by real experts, such as Lynda's Photoshop classes, which are the best I've seen on that subject. Many of her web production courses will take you every step along the way to creating your own website, even if you haven't coded before. Adobe and Apple have both published similar project-based tutorial classes in book form, and I think they're a bit more polished, but the video instructor can help move you along through all the content more easily. Learning software seems to work better from an online video than a book these days; it's helpful to already be sitting at the computer where you're able to try everything out as it's explained. Most people don't seem to retain software principles unless they're trying them while learning.
A bad instructor can make it difficult to sit through a video class. Lynda.com and others generally have a large variety of content creators, so you're not as limited with instructors as you might be at a University, where the same instructor may teach several related applications. Departmental faculty may have much more targeted and creative applications for your software though, while paid corporate software training can be mind-numbingly bad. Continuing ed classes that I've taken usually seemed to just focus on learning the tools in a software product. They often don't or even can't show you how to apply the software for your purposes as full time faculty at a University might. Some Lynda.com instructors weren't great, but most seemed a cut above the continuing ed and corporate software trainers I've learned from or contracted. The majority of the classes seemed to apply the software for an impressive final project.
Redundancy is a real drawback among the online lessons. Often the advanced classes repeat many of the concepts from the introductory "Essentials" courses. If you know an earlier version of an application and just want to learn new features, a book may be a faster route to your goal. I originally suggested the "New Features" lessons that Lynda began to offer for updated releases, and I think they're especially helpful. It's much harder to skim through a video than a page of text, so I'd anticipate having to complement your Lynda.com lessons with other instructional materials.
Lynda.com didn't have as many of the "fluff" courses that LinkedIn is now offering. These titles read like articles from Cosmo. They might be better served to offer "How to respond to a connection request from a recruiter who works in a field completely unrelated to you."
