101 Ways ANY Business Can Use LinkedIn Learning Right Now!

When supporting a new LinkedIn Learning client I'm often asked the same questions and I am hoping this blog (with 101 ideas in it) helps you to complete an assessment of how they plan to use LinkedIn Learning in their business.

I see three key uses for this blog,

a. You are thinking of buying LinkedIn Learning and have questions about how it can be used in your business.

b. You have bought LinkedIn Learning and now want to ensure you get the most from it (perhaps beyond the scope of the original purchasing decision).

c. You're old school, you’ve been on LinkedIn Learning for an age, it’s established and you think (hope) you are getting the most from it!

My suggestion is you read the list and check off each one you do; what’s your score?

Then review the list again, which do you think you could do? How many ideas do you have now?

Then, when next at work, email the people responsible OR start the projects needed to implement these new ideas.

With all of these ideas, if you want additional support then reach out to your LinkedIn account team.

101 ways to use LinkedIn Learning

1) Blend your current training offering, find relevant content on LinkedIn Learning and start blending it! For advice and support on approaching blended training, speak to your Customer Success Manager!

2) Succession planning support – planning out Succession Planning and then implementing the strategy using our material to inform the decision-making process throughout.

3) To support your Manager training of which you may have ‘IC to Manager’, ‘Manager Foundations’ and ‘Manager to Leader’ and possibly even ‘Leadership’, crikey you may even have ‘Leadership for non-leaders’! Never fear though: we have all of these as well.

4) Leadership training is often overlooked, who wants to tell a senior leader they need some training right?! WRONG: there is loads of content for leadership up to c-suite, so get stuck in.

5) Are you marketing externally? Are you doing a good job of it? Are you? Why not check with our content, recommend it to the team, support some new ideas and upskill!

6) What about Internal Marketing? Is it the same person or team? Does it matter? Even more content exists for this side of the marketing coin!

7) Do you operate waiting lists? 3 people need Excel advanced training, but you need at least 5 to pay for a course? Why not map our content to this list, send some content to the people waiting? That waiting list will disappear pretty quickly.

8) Do you put into your job adverts that LinkedIn Learning is provided free as a perk? Why not? Do you have it on your website where you explain the amazing benefits open to staff joining your business? It’s called external branding and talent attraction; we have content on this!

9) Equally, do you promote it internally as a perk? Do you tell people it costs over ￡20 a month for a personal subscription? They’re lucky aren’t they! Make sure they know.

10) Use competitiveness to drive activations and engagement, give people a target for signing up and watching content, pit departments against each other, use it to drive a skillset or a particular course. Competitions are killer!

11) Just like the time I had a client run a photography competition for creative photos of their offices with the winner getting a voucher. In return, the client got nearly 100 new photos of their office for use in communications without paying for a professional to come in, with additional activated users to boot! Have you done anything similar?

12) Are you enacting culture change? Difficult isn’t it! Find help and support for this process in our library.

13) Are you rolling out Microsoft Teams? Don’t do that without the help and support of our amazing Teams content and Teams share functionality!

14) In fact, are you implementing any new software? Will it require extensive new training? Will you be using LinkedIn Learning for that?

15) Are your worker’s Agile? Do they know that? How can you train them to be more agile or work in an agile way? We have stuff for that!

16) Improving your organisational Emotional Intelligence!

17) Improve your wellness offering by providing some of our content, particularly the Thrive series by Arianna Huffington.

18) Improve your Diversity offering with training for individuals involved in the Diversity programmes and also by providing diversity content to your employees.

19) When was the last time you reviewed your pay and reward structures and policies? There is some great content on modern thinking around this complex subject and content for employees to increase their knowledge of this subject prior to pay reviews.

20) What is your ‘Three Letter Acronym’? probably something like IPP or PDP? How do you do performance management in your business? Ensure our content plays a part in this by recommending or instructing staff to pick content to watch every quarter as part of this process.

21) Also: is the ‘Three Letter Acronym’ process being reviewed? Does it need to be? Again, we have great content on how to implement a world class performance review cycle.

22) Have you just made some staff redundant? What about the people you didn’t? They may be suffering just a much with survivor syndrome! We have content to support people in this situation.

23) As for Redundancy support – are your managers well equipped to hold these conversations? Train them up with some of our content.

24) And the people being made redundant? They could watch our content and re-align their career! They can get job hunting tips and support from LinkedIn, career advice, LinkedIn Profile help, I even had one business extend access for three months post redundancy for additional help and support.

25) Do you have a creative team? Designers and Artists? If they aren’t using our library (a third of which is dedicated to creative topics) then you (and they) are mad!

26) What about creative thinking? Hugely popular and very difficult to improve. We have content for that!

27) Creativity is the top skill companies want in 2020, there are other soft skills as well (or Human Skills), why not take a look and start some training and support for these.

28) We also provide a list of hard skills. These trending, emerging hard skills for 2020 are crucial for businesses. We have content to support them. Take a look at the LinkedIn Learning blog page for more info!

29) Do you provide Customer Service? If you have customers you have to assume you do! Training for customer service reps is prevalent in LinkedIn Learning.

30) What about Managers of Customer Service Reps? We have that covered as well!

31) What about internal mobility? I have a client who guarantees an interview if the internal candidate meets mandatory criteria AND completes a set of LinkedIn courses relevant to the role. Can you do the same?

32) Have you spoken to your recruitment team recently? What are they having to hire the most of? What is the most in demand skill they see in the business? Shouldn’t you try to train your way out of this skill deficit while they try to recruit you out of it?

33) Have you uploaded your own content to create personalised learning paths and collections? Why not give it a go today!

34) Have you got Skills Insights (LinkedIn Learning Pro functionality)? If you have, how have you used it? Try gauging the health of your business right now across your peers and find training to support.

35) Do you encourage a video a day habit with staff? Do you? Habits, once made, are very difficult to break, start the trend.

36) Are you trying to create a learning culture? Do you know what that means? We have content on what learning cultures are and how to create one.

37) Set up your HR Business Partners for success with ‘soft interventions’. For those cases that require some support but not a presence why not additionally send some content to help with the ‘issue’. Track if this helps in a decrease in HR time spent on ‘firefighting’!

38) You can do the same with the IT Helpdesk. Map our content to your most regularly reported issues and send it out to users who call or email in. See if there is a decline in requests.

39) You can also train those helpdesk workers with our content, some great stuff on there especially for first-line support, why not put some training plans in place and tie them to promotion through tiers of support?

40) You can also use our content to reduce training costs for expensive technical training such as SharePoint Admin, Salesforce Admin, Development tools etc. Ask a technical lead in your business to review the technical catalogue!

41) Additionally to this, there are lots of Certification Prep courses that are huge money savers! These courses and content cost huge amounts when delivered face to face with the added pressure that the person MUST pass when they finish – look at the page above and see what uses you could make of it!

42) You could also consider extending access for leavers beyond the date their contract terminates, I have a couple of clients who provide continuing access for up to 3 months after an employee has left. Why? Branding, goodwill and because it is a nice thing to do seem to be the standard reasons!

43) Talking of external brand, why not encourage your employees to share favourite courses to LinkedIn. This does three things: improves perception of your brand externally, starts to foster an environment of social learning and lastly allows people external to your company to access the content for free for 24 hours (a nice gift!).

44) Part of the gifting and general use of Learning is to help people learn new skills, those skills need not be business related, as crazy as that sounds! Why not encourage the use of the platform for helping people learn new hobbies, creativity learnt one way, pays back into your business in other ways!

45) Supporting your onboarding programme. A Learning Path with a video from a senior leader welcoming them, links to generic content suitable for all and aligned to your culture and custom links to your benefits pages (and other intranet sites) is one way to build a class leading onboarding experience.

46) Have you got apprentices? Do they have to learn generic business skills as part of their role? Do you use LinkedIn Learning for that?

47) Do you have a grad scheme? Do you use our content to support their ongoing development (alongside other activities)? You should!

48) Pre-boarding – that onboarding pathway you have for your new staff, why not give access to a staff member before they start and assign it to them. The point where they are at their most engaged is before they start, it is also they time most likely to drop out of the new role. Pre-boarding helps with this!

49) Sales training on our platform is pretty good! It’s also micro as well as macro so busy salespeople will love it! Our salespeople do, so yours certainly will.

50) Sales Leadership is also covered with content on planning strategy and sales approaches, as a senior sales leader to review it.

51) Do sales use a CRM? Does anyone else? Almost certainly there will be training for it on LinkedIn and if not there will at least be content on best practice uses of ANY CRM system.

52) Do you use Social Selling? Do you know what it is? Another job for that senior sales leader to review. Our content for Social Selling is very good.

53) Do you have a Sales Analytics function? Sales Operations are suitably covered and will help with territory planning, approaches and product direction, ask them to review the content!

54) Do you have an Analytics function full stop? We have some great content to help here. Did you know there is a deficit of Data Scientists in the world but over 4 million people with almost ALL the skills needed, they just need some additional training and support.

55) There is some outstanding Entrepreneurship content on our platform, have a look at the kind of stuff on there and decide if this is a skill set worth focusing on? Often Business Development and Product Development benefit hugely from this.

56) There is some great finance training for finance teams and accounting professionals, does your finance team use it?

57) Can your non-finance managers budget, cost and purchase without falling over? Do they need help here? Our content can support.

58) EXCEL, EXCEL, EXCEL, EXCEL, ETC

59) You can also use our content to help your staff in their personal lives with complex and difficult situations they may find themselves in such as finance trouble, loss, difficult relationships etc. Speak to your wellness lead (or equivalent).

60) Digital transformation, who doesn’t love it? Who knows what it means? It doesn’t matter, we have it covered!

61) Rolling out a coaching programme? Use our content to support the coaches.

62) Also use our content for the coachees to ensure they are getting the most from this process.

63) Same could be said for mentors who are entering a mentoring programme!

64) Oh, and the mentees!

65) What about the person designing these programmes, probably in Organisational Development OR a HR Business Partner? Do they need help in designing and rolling it out successfully?

66) What about helping people move into new careers internally or externally. Helping people leave healthily is just as important as retaining and promoting people who wish to stay. Do both better!

67) Do you need to improve productivity? We got you covered!

68) Helping you (and others) recall an email, a frankly mythical sounding action that can be done properly!

69) Collaborating with businesses outside of your organisation (external partner agencies or organisations), we can help with peer-to-peer management, influencing skills and collaboration!

70) Dealing with the GDPR!

71) Having some fun with quirky courses like learning how to draw monsters!

72) Getting advice from Nick Offerman, Kobe Bryant, Gwen Stefani, Gwyneth Paltrow or Wyclef Jean!

73) Building a company Facebook page.

74) Building a company LinkedIn page

75) Marketing on Instagram and Social Media.

76) Build yourself a KILLER BRAND!

77) Change your policy so that you must check LinkedIn before buying training from an external provider!

78) Start a review process of face-to-face (or ILT) training and decide what you can replace. For those of you worried about this remember – training is essentially just spending your entire career trying to make yourself redundant! Funny how more work always seems to crop up.

79) Have you got remote workers? Difficult to train them isn’t it! It shouldn’t be!

80) With the ‘Rock Your Profile’ course you can turn all your employees into brand ambassadors.

81) Help save struggling employees with holistic support (part LinkedIn and part ‘lots of other stuff’!), I hear often of how employees have continued in their roles, happy and confident, thanks to LinkedIn Learning!

82) Put out time-saving software tips AND/OR time management tips on a weekly basis to help staff and contribute to that ‘culture of learning!’

83) Improve your external customer website/experience with training and support from our content.

84) Make use of QR Codes for marketing and internal comms (there is a video titled ‘how to make and use QR Codes’, take a look!)

85) Go Viral on social media with our advice!

86) Understand g-suite productivity pointers to help employees, particularly those more used to Microsoft.

87) Or do the same with Microsoft products! Its called support but it’s got a pointy, sharp edge!

88) Helping your employees and yourself to earn extra money with a side hustle, one of my favourite courses: 32 ways to make extra money, training needn’t always be about corporate objectives!

89) Understand your employees learning habits, favoured learning times and content engaged with (and on what devices) from the statistics. Use this to inform your learning strategy.

90) Get advice from the Hulk on overcoming obstacles (Edward Norton!)

91) Help your software developers stay up to date with the most relevant processes and software with our most recently released content!

92) Make use of the continuing education units for PMP, NASBA, SHRM and other qualified staff.

93) Learn more about hosting engaging internal webinars for staff, ensuring remote training is as fun and interactive as it can be! 

94) Put on some amazing external webinars for customers to drive engagement with your products!

95) And what about External events that are face-to-face, there is loads of advice for this as well!

96) Use the content to improve customer retention by learning about the strategy of customer service and then how to implement the changes that really make a difference.

97) Review your customer complaints process, redesign the way you handle them and implement it to improve customer perception and reviews.

98) Help manage change for complex, wide-ranging issues within your business.

99) Draw and create monsters with your children! Creativity comes from unusual places plus this one is super-fun!

100) Start a work band with your colleagues using our content to brush up on your skills like guitar, piano, sound recording and music management!

101) Learn how to use our content to take pictures using iPhones rather than relying on expensive DSLR cameras all the time, especially good for field-based employees.

There it is! 101 ways to use LinkedIn Learning in your business, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas and I welcome feedback either via comments or messages.