3 Ways to Utilize LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you applying what you have learned in a LinkedIn Learning course?

LinkedIn Learning has so many courses you can take show your lifelong learning and initiative. Microsoft Office, customer relations management, financial accounting, entrepreneurship, product design, video editing, cloud computing, and information technology, are some of the many topics you can look and learn as you go. However, what happens if you complete 30 LinkedIn Learning courses in a short time?

While presenting your completed courses on your LinkedIn Learning does show you have the willingness to learn, the problem is not about how you show them the work. It’s about how you recall the knowledge gained from those courses and use them into practice. In other words, if you’re learning new skills to use, taking LinkedIn Learning courses, even with exercise files provided, isn’t enough. There needs to be a way you can practice using them to get used to them and utilize them in situations that are required. Sometimes that may mean slowing down on your learning curve to make sure you can apply your knowledge first.

If you read Deanna Pate’s article, “The Skills Companies Need Most in 2020 – And How to Learn Them,” it recommends 45 courses related to 15 skills. While it does provide a starting mechanism on learning the skills companies need most, the real challenge is starting to use them after completing the courses and how to keep learning. As such, some instructors say, “The key to learning is to keep practicing.”

As one of my connections told me, people can choose courses to highlight their experiences, projects, or university courses strategic to their field. Still, that doesn’t mean we don’t start looking into new knowledge by completing a LinkedIn Learning course first.

Where do I start? What can I do to begin using some of these skills? What are some ways I can start practicing them? It always depends on what you have learned the skills for. Nevertheless, I’ve conceptualized three simple ways you can do to start practicing the new skill you’ve learned.

1. Do a side project using the skills you’ve gathered.

Did you complete Chelsea Krost’s Marketing to Millennials? Maybe you can host a live LinkedIn session to not only share your marketing experience. Demonstrate how you would market your content, such as a video on organizing your day planner. 

Did you take React.js Essential Training by Eve Porcello? Begin using React.js to program what the user sees on a website; be sure to explore as much of React.js as possible to fully understand it. You won’t know when certain features will come in handy!

Got a certificate from completing Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging by Pat Wadors? Show your initiative by getting involved with a few clubs or units; they may need help with bringing in a diverse range of audiences for different events. You can also try to be a guest speaker in a show to talk about what are some things human resources can do to bring in a diverse range of employees. 

Keep in mind, not all disciplines of courses LinkedIn Learning provides can be practiced with side projects. A side project is meant to move forward in skill development in one area, where some disciplines are more practical to have them than others. For instance, a project in managing a company is probably not ideal, as in reality a lot of factors affect the success or failure of a company. For more concrete disciplines such as filmography, side projects are assets for jobs. 

Every side project is completely different. While some are harder to work on than others because of the skills needed and what recruiters are looking for, you are still demonstrating that you’ve gained your knowledge and you’ve practiced it. This is what recruiters are looking for.

Leave a comment below to showcase your side project to others after completing a LinkedIn Learning course; you can even write a post on LinkedIn to show it!

2. Integrate it into your role, education, or hobby.

If you’ve taken a course for your job, education, or hobby, you should try to see how you can put your knowledge into action as soon as possible. By doing this, you’re showing your connections you are practicing a new skill and building some experience from it. 

To start, I recommend copying and pasting the transcript of each video into a word processor, like Microsoft Word, then going through it to find important concepts. Use the highlight feature of your processor to highlight some lines as important concepts. In my case, I usually use yellow. Then, depending on where you want to use them, either make notes out of those highlighted sections, print them, and bring them to your job, or simply keep them on your laptop to refer to them later.

You should ask your manager to see if they are open to you bringing notes on the skills needed for the job. Most of the time, they’ll say yes, but sometimes they may recommend a different approach overall. Some may provide you with mentoring and coaching to help you with bringing your knowledge. It entirely depends on management.

If you have taken a course specifically for university, such as an academic project, you can check with your professor and your classmates to see how you can use some of the key concepts in an assignment. That way your learning is aligned with their expectations. Sometimes they may even offer to clarify key ideas so that you can use them in your assignment. Be careful, though; LinkedIn Learning courses cannot be used as sources of information in essays and reports, because professors and instructors can’t access them easily.

In integrating the knowledge learned as a hobby, it depends on what you want to do. For instance, if you’ve taken a course on Android app development, you can take on a hobby by writing code and playing around with the features of the Android development tools. Likewise, if you’ve taken a course on writing articles such as this one, you can write a series of LinkedIn articles and blogs to get your word out. Simply make sure that the hobby you want to practice is at an appropriate place.

Try this out on your own and see what you get from doing so; leave a comment below to share your experience if you like!

3. Talk to the instructor, knowledge experts, and your connections on what you’ve learned.

One of the newest features we have available on LinkedIn Learning is the Questions & Answers Pane in viewing a course. It’s a panel where you can write posts and comments to ask and answer questions on the subject material. It’s perfect to ask some common and interesting questions that the instructor may help you with.

You should do more than use the Q&A Pane. I recommend you reach out to the instructor directly. You may need to send a connection invite or an InMail to share your question, but some instructors are open to receiving cold emails directly by checking out their websites. You can also look for some knowledge experts who are familiar with the concepts, or perhaps connections on your network.

The important thing is, you need a mechanism to discuss what you have learned from the course and be able to clear up ambiguities. It’s also a chance to recall your knowledge, which I think is an important fundamental to learning. You can’t go wrong with bringing the discussion about, especially when used in work or academic settings.

Some of your connections may even recommend you to practice on your own. For instance, if you’ve learned how to program using Python, why not use that to solve some coding challenges? Likewise, if you’ve taken Developing Your Emotional Intelligence by Gemma Leigh Roberts; why not do the exercises yourself and share your answers later to discuss your knowledge?

If you’ve completed a course as part of a job, you should ask your manager to see if you are applying your course knowledge to your tasks already. You should do the same thing with your coworkers as well. Essentially, you are taking time to refresh ideas from the course and identifying those that haven’t been applied yet, then seeing what you can do to apply them as the next step. Remember, you’re only learning, so don’t necessarily apply all the concepts right away; it takes time.

Write a comment below on what you did in reflection to completing a course! Be sure not to break your non-disclosure agreement or academic policies on doing so, however.

Now that you’ve read on three different ideas you can do after completing a LinkedIn Learning course, I recommend go out and try out one of the three methods. Then share with us which one has worked, which one hasn’t worked, or which one has somewhat worked but some more advice should be given. Remember, your goal is to continue learning the skills you’ve gathered some awareness out of by completing these LinkedIn Learning courses. It’s not enough to only complete them and show your certificates; you need to put them into practice to have people see you can use these skills.

Otherwise, show us how it went, or share some further insight into this. Good luck!

I’d like to thank Danielle Spindola and Deanne Aby for reviewing this article and sharing some thoughtful comments!

Photos 1 and 5: Made by me, with the exception of the LinkedIn logo (trademark and copyrighted material of LinkedIn Corporation)

Photo 2: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Photo 3: Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Photo 4: Photo by Headway on Unsplash

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