Florencia Basavilbaso
Content Writer At Gradehacker
Online learning platforms have become a powerful tool for personal and professional development, and within the main choices, we decided to do a Linkedin Learning review to show you what we found for you.
We know that it can be challenging to determine which one will address your learning needs better, this is why At Gradehacker, we have years of researching and providing the best learning resources to our clients.
As the non-traditional #1 resource, we made multiple reviews in the past about all the different online learning websites that you can consider.
This time, we came here with a Linkedin Learning review for a complete insight into how you can use their many individual courses to enhance your career path and creative skills.
So if you are ready to see if this is your chance to meet your career goals and explore the LinkedIn Learning experience, let’s start!
What is Linkedin Linkedin Learning?
Linkedin Learning is an online platform known as a part of Linkedin, where you can learn and get deeper into any skill or subject that could come in handy for opening up career opportunities.
Industry experts carefully create and develop these courses, ensuring that learners receive top-quality, relevant, and up-to-date content. This e-learning platform provides access to over 16,000 courses mainly focused on:
- Business potential
- Technology
- Creative skills
It also offers professional certifications for anyone looking for career growth and further opportunities within your chosen field by developing critical skills for careers, emphasizing high-quality content, and offering an extensive course library.
Join us as we dive into this full LinkedIn Learning review, exploring the benefits and features of their courses and discovering how they can empower you to thrive in today’s competitive professional world.
Who is LinkedIn Learning For?
As previously mentioned, LinkedIn Learning is designed to enhance professional expertise and advance your career. The platform is great for:
- Professionals looking to master skills: from enhancing your existing skills to explore new areas, it provides courses for different skill levels and career paths
- Job seekers: The platform offers courses that help develop in-demand skills and increase your chances of getting hired.
- Entrepreneurs and business owners: You’ll find valuable insights to start and grow on your journey, like business strategy, leadership courses and finance
- Lifelong learners: LinkedIn Learning is also suitable for individuals passionate about continuous learning and personal development.
LinkedIn's Selection of Courses: Choose Yours!
LinkedIn offers a variety of courses across the entire platform, providing a table of content that guides learners to quality material for developing essential skills for careers.
These are just to mention some. but as you can see from their extensive list of categories, they offer multiple video and audio learning courses alike.
LinkedIn Learning also has the option of downloading exercise files that come along with the classes and offline viewing, allowing learners to access course material even without an internet connection.
It’s one of the top-online learning platforms anybody can use. If you are interested in learning what other alternatives you can find, here you have our list:
How Legit is Linkedin Learning?
With so many years in the market and being part of the most used job searching network, LinkedIn Learning is highly legit among online course platforms, known for its credibility and great offerings.
With many courses pointing at the most popular industries and disciplines, covering diverse learning needs, LinkedIn Learning provides learning paths, ensuring a complete education and adding credibility to the platform.
How Does Linkedin Learning Works?
One good quality we can start mentioning is that navigating through the platform and finding the courses that you want is very easy.
1. Accessing LinkedIn Learning:
You can access it from the website or download the LinkedIn Learning mobile app. Then you can create a LinkedIn account or log in with your email if you don’t have one.
You can then start searching for a course you want and choose from different categories, trending courses, or recommended courses based on your LinkedIn profile and interests.
2. Course Enrollment:
Once you find what you want, click on a course to view its details, such as the course description, instructor information, and course curriculum.
Enroll in the course to gain access to its spectrum of content.
3. Learning Experience:
LinkedIn Learning courses consist of video tutorials that cover various topics and skills.
Videos may include demonstrations, lectures, and presentations to engage with the material, plus exercises, quizzes, and supplementary resources to reinforce learning.
4. Flexibility and Progress Tracking:
With LinkedIn Learning, you can learn at your own pace and customize your learning schedule.
You can also track your progress within the course curriculum and come back to the course from where you left off, allowing you to pick up your learning journey easily.
5. Additional Features:
You can take advantage of features like:
- Transcripts and interactive course notes.
- Access the course discussion boards
- Add completed courses and certificates to your LinkedIn profile
6. Continuous Learning:
Many courses can help you as a college student or professional looking to improve.
These courses will make you stand out and can help you no matter your field, college level, or profession.
7. Offline Learning:
Accessing courses offline may be one of the best features. You can also download courses when you don’t have an internet connection.
As you can see, LinkedIn Learning offers a flexible and self-paced learning experience. With it, you can acquire new skills, enhance your knowledge, and helps you stay up-to-date with the industry’s latest information.
LinkedIn Learning offers a monthly or annual subscription plan. Both have a month free trial period, and after that, the subscription fee is:
- Annual Subscription: $239,88 yearly ($19.99 per month)
- Monthly Subscription: $39.99 per month
Whether you subscribe or start your one-month free trial, you’ll have:
- Unlimited access to their thousands of courses
- Learn on your time with in‑depth quality videos, audio‑only, or offline viewing
- Course recommendations based on your interests and professional skills
- Earning a certificate of completion to add your LinkedIn profile
- Practice what you learn with exercise files, downloadable material, and quizzes
- Salary and job insights, unlimited profile viewing, InMail credits, and more
You can also purchase a course individually; the price will depend on your chosen course.
This one is a great online business course where you’ll learn strategies that will benefit you and help you succeed in multiple areas of your life.
If you think about it, we are always using strategies to get something or somewhere, and if you dominate this classic business skill, you can dominate any situation in life.
The strategic thinking course offers engaging online learning content that helps learners develop critical thinking skills and apply them to real-world scenarios.
LinkedIn Premium is a subscription-based service that offers users advanced platform features, including access to LinkedIn Learning.
One of its key benefits is access to LinkedIn Learning’s premium features, which include a wide range of courses taught by industry experts and cover diverse professional topics.
Upon completing courses, you can also obtain valuable certificates as proof of your achievements to future employers and academic institutions.
This premium subscription also impacts how the LinkedIn job search platform sees you. It helps you further develop your professional skills and expand your knowledge base.
It is worth clarifying that a LinkedIn Learning subscription and a LinkedIn premium are not the same. While the first one is more focused on the features within the learning platform, the other one is more oriented toward making you more noticeable to potential employers.
Our Personal Experience With LinkedIn Courses
Once you enter the website, you’ll see personalized recommendations based on your LinkedIn profile details like job searches, past experience, and interests.
This is a great advantage since it makes finding courses that can enhance your profession easier.
To access any of the courses, you’ll need to purchase the course or subscribe.
When you register for either of this options, they will ask you for credit card information and after you are set up you’ll then start your free trial.
That is a big downside since there are no free options, and even though you probably know what the course is about because they offer a course preview, that preview is usually just a presentation and don’t tend to say much.
You still don’t know how the instructor will be throughout the whole class and if this platforms follows a format that you’ll like overall.
Luckily before buying any subscription or class, to have a better idea of what the course is about, you can click on any class that catches your interest and find:
- A course preview, when it was realized, the class level rating, and how many learners the class has
- What's included, like the number of chapter quizzes, accessibility, and if it comes with a certificate of completion
Most of their courses come with a certificate of completion.
However, some have frequent updates and won’t offer certificates, as new content is continuously being added.
LinkedIn Learning has a clean design; both straightforward and simple. Whether you use the search bar, the menu, or personalized suggestions, finding what you need is easy and the website feels very intuitive to navigate.
But overall, the layout seems friendly and well organized, the content and courses are valuable, and most courses are created to be completed quickly.
You’ll find courses that take up to five hours to be completed, but most of them last, on average, 2 hours of competition.
Regarding the information we found on each, they were quite useful, even if we already have experience in the fields.
The first course shared many best practices in graphic design and tips on creating social media strategies and campaigns. The second one focused on marketing plans and gave us a clear overview of the different elements that should be considered in any career development. And the third one taught us a lot of tips and tricks for improving our writing skills
A solid advantage we found was content organization.
Because the video lessons were well-organized and structured into sections and chapters, it was easy to focus on each topic without feeling overwhelmed by information.
LinkedIn Learning offers a user-friendly experience with quality courses that are easy to comprehend.
However, there are many factors and limitations that, for us, make the learning experience be skippable.
The Issue With LinkedIn Learning
There are some issues you might want to check before investing in this platform, this is what we found:
Limited Interactivity
First of all, all LinkedIn Learning courses base their learning experience mainly around pre-recorded video content.
Yes, the video tutorials are informative and well-structured, but there are few interactive elements to support the lessons. Some courses have discussion forums, but since participation in these is not mandatory, most boards have little to no posts to interact with.
And the exercises that some classes are simple, but most importantly, no one will grade them.
You can complete the activity to track your progress by yourself but don’t expect to have an instructor reviewing and giving you valuable feedback on what you understand.
Still, we know that this is a very common issue that most online learning platforms have. It doesn’t impact the value of the content taught in the lessons, only the learning experience.
Variability on Industries
Another problem we found with LinkedIn Learning is that it has limited course offerings for some industries.
While business, marketing, and other professional fields have a wide range of options for users, you won’t find many courses if you are looking for more practical skills related to creativity or similar areas.
So, depending on your profession or area of interest, you may find that certain industry-specific or highly specialized courses are not available on the platform.
And if you are looking for these types of creative courses, then we recommend checking out our Skillshare review.
Course Complexity and Subscription Cost
But if we need to point out one major problem with LinkedIn Learning, that would be its pricing.
On the one hand, it’s important to clarify that almost $40 a month is a subscription cost similar to the monthly plans offered by other online learning platforms like Coursera and Skillshare.
But on the other, LinkedIn Learning’s courses not only focus on a few areas of specialization (as mentioned above) but most offer introductory to intermediate-level content.
If you are looking for advanced knowledge to significantly improve your professional skills, it’s less likely that you will find a course like this on LinkedIn Learning.
They can be a great choice if you don’t have that much experience and want to expand your LinkedIn profile with certifications. You can pay for the monthly subscription (or use the one-month free trial) and complete as many courses as you can.
This way, you end up with multiple recognitions and certifications accredited by the job searching platform you are using to grow professionally.
But if you are a non-traditional adult student who already has professional experiences and skills, there won’t be much for you here.
You can earn certifications that prove your knowledge, but whether paying $40 for that will be worth it is entirely up to you.
Our Verdict
Deciding whether LinkedIn Learning is worth it depends on individual needs, goals, and preferences. But in our opinion, if you are a non-traditional student, LinkedIn Learning won’t be the best choice for you.
They stand out for providing various multimedia resources, including video tutorials, audio classes, simple exercises, and real-life examples.
The platform’s user-friendly interface and smooth navigation further enhance the learning experience, making it accessible to individuals with different levels of technology skills.
But is it worth it?
LikedIn Learning is worth it if you don’t have that much experience and want to grow your resume and feel more confident about your abilities, especially if you want to do it quickly.
But if your intention is to learn something from scratch and you are looking to prove your skill at something, we recommend platforms like Coursera, you can check our review for further information.
The reason for this suggestion is that, on an educational level, sites like Coursera are backed up by recognized universities, where more courses follow a similar structure and content of a college.
Linkedin Learning courses are managed by trustworthy instructors with expertise in their field, but their class content is programmed so you can understand the essence of the subject and start growing that skill.
Pros
- Friendly and intuitive layout
- Great range of courses
- Quick and easy to learn
- Offline and download class option
- Flexibility
- Engaging classes
- Personalized suggestion
- Professional certificate and training
- Provides certificates that can be added to your LinkedIn profile
Cons
- High prices
- Lacks range topics since they only cover the creative, business, and tech
- Won't replace academic institution classes
- Do not offer credits or degrees
Upgrade Your Skills With LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning courses are an excellent resource for anyone looking to enhance their skills and knowledge. With access to thousands of options covering a wide range of topics, you can find the perfect class to meet your needs.
Whether you’re just starting out or an experienced professional, you can find the perfect path to help you reach your goals.
But If you need personal assistance building your professional profile and putting yourself out there, you can book a call with us or see how we can help you create an eye-catching resume that will get you hired!
And for further information about career advice, you can check our blogs:
Florencia Basavilbaso
Florencia Basavilbaso is a content creator passioned for writing, music, films, and the arts. At Gradehacker, she helps to improve non-traditional students life’s by finding and providing the most useful information, so they can always progress. You can find her on LinkedIn.
