LinkedIn unveils E-learning portal
LinkedIn unveils E-learning portal :- LinkedIn, the working world’s social network, which now has around 450 million followers and is in full process of being acquired by the Microsoft for $26.2 billion, unwrapped its newest scheme and it is its E- Learning portal. It is all set to expand its site beyond the job hunting and recruitment, which are its two business mainstays.
The company has launched a new site called LiknkedIn Learning, an e-learning portal tailored to the individuals, but is also catering to businesses which are looking forward to keep training their employees, and moreover even the educational institutions exploring e-learning cases.
About the new site
The new site was officially unveiled at the LinkedIn’s offices in San Francisco, coming in about a year and a half after the LinkedIn acquired online learning site named Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. A large portion of LinkedIn’s Learning process is based on Lynda content, and goes live with around 9,000 courses on an offer.
Subjects that are taught through the service include business, technology and creative topics, with courses running the gamut from the programming skills to the writing and accounting.
Courses can be selected by both employees and as recommended by their employers and HR managers who can access LinkedIn’s analytics products to monitor their employees’ progress and also look at the wider range of what is being taught as a point of reference and curators at the LinkedIn itself.
The education at the LinkedIn is available for its Premium subscribers, who will get around 25 new courses every week based on the information on the site. LinkedIn adds that it will soon be releasing its enterprise tier so that the large companies can take subscriptions for their entire employee base.
Read Here : Paytm can soon raise Rs.2, 000 crore from Goldman Sachs and Mediatek: Reports
Linkedln’s motif
LinkedIn’s emphasis on the education and learning goes hand-in-hand with the company’s ongoing primary role, as a place where different people go to create and maintain their professional profiles publicly, to look for jobs opportunities. Also, building on that place to enhance your professional skills makes a lot more sense.
It also gives a coda to the LinkedIn’s efforts in trying to give higher education facilities. LinkedIn started opening up its special, verified profile pages to different universities and colleges a couple of years ago and encouraging the youngsters to start building their LinkedIn profiles as young as 13.
The whole idea was to use this medium as a way of bringing the users on-board early in their professional lives or before they even started it, but also to effectively hook into an alumni job-finding network for the recruitment business.
This was something what was always missing, though, without offering a learning component, it will be interesting to see how LinkedIn tries to address this.
Interestingly, LinkedIn Learning comes soon after a week when LinkedIn unveiled another of its take on how to bridge that gap in India, the company now has an online job placement service that tests an individual’s skills and then suggests them the jobs which might be suitable for him or her. It does not take an extra leap to include training, but one could easily imagine how LinkedIn Learning could fit into that product, too.
All by CEO
In a presentation in San Francisco about the new launched product, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner described how the education has become “one of the most important priorities.” He stated that the World Economic Forum expects about 5 million jobs to be displaced by the introduction of new technologies, and that 78% of the CFOs surveyed believe that around 25% of their workforces could be displaced by the year 2020.
Apart from the larger ideology that LinkedIn sets to describe about being a charter of the world’s “economic graph” LinkedIn also sees education as a business opportunity, with in time experience training from LinkedIn as a key way of meeting the demand.
