By Cole Strzelecki
Over the summer, I was asked by Western New England University’s human resources department member, Austin Roberts, to sign up for LinkedIn Learning through the school’s partnership with the platform. He requested that I try LinkedIn Learning over the rest of the summer and share my honest opinion on the experience and the platform itself. This article will discuss the time I spent with the program and how I feel about it and give readers an idea of what to expect if they begin using it.
Signing up for LinkedIn Learning was a straightforward process, and once in, I could begin learning almost immediately. Once a week, I would sit down for thirty minutes and use the platform to learn about improving my skills in topics related to my desired future career. I took two full online LinkedIn courses over the summer, both of which included multiple hours worth of content.
The first course I took through LinkedIn Learning was mobile photography. This course aimed to teach people how to use their phone camera to take higher-quality photos. As someone who loves taking pictures of their surroundings and tends to take photos with their phone more often than a camera, I was immediately interested in learning what this course offered.
The course was split into six sections, each with videos to watch and learn about specific aspects of the smartphone’s photo-taking system. The sections were as follows: Introduction, The Basics, Shooting with a Smartphone, Common Hazards, Special Features, and The Conclusion. The course offered a quiz at the end of every section to check if I had learned what it was trying to teach through each video. If I answered a question incorrectly, I’d have another chance to answer the question and, after completing the quiz, be asked to review the video related to the question I answered incorrectly.
As my first LinkedIn Learning course, it wasn’t too difficult to complete while following my schedule for learning through the program, and it ended up being an enjoyable experience. The course was, in total, about an hour and a half long, so I spread out my learning of it over a couple of weeks. However, everything the course was trying to teach stuck with me and carried over into the following week, making me feel like, in the end, the course taught me something about smartphone camera use for taking better photos.
After completing this first course, I moved on to a new, longer course. This one was about becoming a better editor and had about four hours and fifty minutes of content. Though summer was nearing its end when I began this, I was determined to complete it before returning to campus.
As a more extended course covering most aspects of editing, it included more sections to watch with more individual videos. Some of the videos were also much longer than the ones in the first course I took, to the point where a third of a section could account for thirty minutes of learning time. However, as the course was on a topic I found to be interesting, I was able to fly through it, spending extra time some weeks watching more of the course’s videos out of sincere interest in the topic.
After spending part of my summer using LinkedIn Learning, I can honestly say that I am on board with using this program, and I am glad that our University is partnering with it. The courses are generally easy to follow and succeed in teaching you things you may not have known before, whether it relates to your career or a pastime you enjoy. As long as you find a course that interests you, using LinkedIn Learning will be an enjoyable learning experience.
I recommend using LinkedIn Learning. I enjoyed the time I spent learning through their online video courses, even though I was on a vacation from school. It is a program I will continue using anytime I want a simple, easily accessible learning experience about subjects I’m interested in while not in school.
