Can Microsoft Turn LinkedIn Learning into an Ed Tech Company?
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
The creator content community is all about a content basic income where users aren't just used but celebrated and rewarded, and it's what makes platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Substack, Instagram, Patreon, Snapchat, and even OnlyFans so trending.
LinkedIn Has Chosen Not to Enter the Creator Economy
In the WFM remote work era, LinkedIn has a unique opportunity with LinkedIn Learning, live events and creating a more viable creator economy, but it’s missing the most important incentive of all for viable content creator programs: actual earnings via Stripe. None of its products of features really take off, because the incentive system is not in place.
Real incentives are lacking on LinkedIn for creators, but LinkedIn in its service to Microsoft is not simply to be a cash-cow of subscription revenue and Ad growth, but to help Microsoft unify its corporate metaverse play. As it is today, it's hard to justify LinkedIn is playing a productive role in Microsoft's goal here.
To create a viable and robust LinkedIn Learning platform and creator content ecosystem, LinkedIn needs to get serious about creating incentives for business educators, corporate influencers and LinkedIn Learning course creators, not to mention its Newsletter play. It's all about creating creator scale if you actually want your initial investment in product to pan out.
But in the internet of 2022, even Twitter has super follows, what is scale without creator monetization? Makes you wonder what internet LinkedIn product leaders or execs are watching from their boardrooms in such a period of digital transformation?
What is LinkedIn Learning Today?
LinkedIn Learning’s report of its top 20 most popular classes of 2021, which for the first time saw an array of courses geared toward diversity, equity and inclusion topics as some of the platform’s most-viewed online classes.
So what can we learn from the list? We find that LinkedIn Learning is still in a pop psych phase of its development and has yet to provide more robust soft skill emergence. These aren't the soft skills augmentation that professionals necessarily need, it's harder skills and more specific courses that are harder to find.
Here is the list for 2020:
Instructor: Stacey Gordon
Course description: Identify some of the most common forms bias can take and uncover strategies for identifying and overcoming those personal or organizational biases.?
Instructor: Dorie Clark
Course description:?Managers and leaders learn how to use strategic thinking to guide teams and develop solutions to key business problems.
Instructor: Dennis Taylor
Course description: Discover techniques to navigate multiple worksheets and formatting shortcuts across the platform to help save time.
Instructor: Jeff Ansel
Course description: Learn how to organize your thoughts, breathe properly, use your body and words to express ideas, and understand how to overcome anxiety.
Instructor: Pete Mockaitis
Course description:?Adapted from the podcast “How to Be Awesome at Your Job,” discover ways to control your focus, ensure consistency in your delivery and establish recovery methods in the face of difficult situations.
Instructors: Verna Myers and Arianna Huffington
Course description: Discover how to create inclusive environments where everyone can thrive, and how to overcome saying the wrong thing — or nothing at all — and counter unconscious bias in our words and actions.
Instructor: Pat Wadors
Course description:?Managers and executives are invited to learn how to drive the conversation on DIBs — Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging —?to include the third element to an important conversation and understand the best path to hire and retain diverse talent, listen to employees and integrate DIBs into your employee experience.
Instructor: David Rivers
Course description:?Learn the features and capabilities of Excel to begin creating and opening workbooks, entering text and numbers, working with formulas, basic formatting, inserting charts and sharing and printing workbooks.
Instructor: Mike Figliuolo
Course description:?Practice a series of techniques to define a problem and the tools to begin solving for the solution. Plus, develop this skill across your team.
Instructor: Dave Crenshaw
Course description: Develop habits to be more organized and reduce clutter in your workspace; stay mentally on task and eliminate the to-dos you have floating in your head; and develop a time budget to focus on your most valuable activities.
Instructor: Bill Weinman
Course description: Learn key functions like creating tables, defining relationships, manipulating strings, numbers and dates; using triggers to automate actions; and using sub selects and views.
Instructor: Chelsea Krost
Course description: Create consistency in your routine to promote yourself and opportunities to monetize your brand.?
领英推荐
Instructor: Doug Rose
Course description: Embracing an agile mindset can help you prioritize customers over shareholders and create a more horizontal team framework that welcomes input from all.
Instructor: Daisy Lovelace
Course description: Gather insights on how to ask better questions, respond with more empathy and extend a meaningful apology.?
Instructor: Jeff Toister
Course description: Learn how to help your customers feel more valued to keep them coming back, provide the right help at just the right time and use customer feedback to improve the experience for everyone on both sides of the transaction.
Instructor: Dorie Clark
Course description: Learn to grapple with tricky situations (like how to deal with interruptions), respond to critical feedback and effectively communicate across cultures.
Instructor: Bill Weinman
Course description: Create more efficient and effective scripts and put yourself in a position to be in demand.
Instructor: Tatiana Kolovou
Course description:?Prepare to make a powerful, memorable first impression at any moment in person, on the phone or even online.
Instructor: Dennis Taylor
Course description: Learn critical shortcuts to speed up your work and practical examples in real world scenarios.
Instructor: Brad Batesole
Linked Learning has a Discovery and On-Boarding Bottleneck
However LinkedIn Learning also has a greater emphasis on targeted skill sets for particular industries.
With a subscription model and B2B Ad solutions, LinkedIn is becoming quite profitable for Microsoft but its in-house innovation has been rather sketchy with products. It needs to elevate LinkedIn Learning to a product that Microsoft would be confident to spin out into an Industrial Education company, like what Salesforce is doing with its streaming project Salesforce Plus.
Even after years of development, LinkedIn Learning is far far from that point of business education validation. Back in the day, Lynda was only acquired for $1.5 Billion. But in the WFM reality, LinkedIn Learning needs to push harder if Microsoft wants to capitalize on the stupendous opportunity for the future of Ed Tech.
It needs its Newsletter product to be tethered to LinkedIn learning and provide real business and educational material too. It needs a content creator community that is properly incentivized to empower business education and not just get vanity metrics.
COVID has reshaped the global workplace and left in its wake the urge for change — the need to do things differently, remotely and more in alignment with the things that matter most.
While Microsoft has done well with Teams, LinkedIn Learning needs a substantial funding boost and a new generation of creators needs to be attracted to LinkedIn in the right age category and global locations to maximize LinkedIn Learning’s growth.
If LinkedIn isn’t able to attract GenZ and Millennials, its B2B and professional education platform will have limited opportunities. It’s not about creating Stories, being like Facebook or getting meaningless app engagement on posts and its already broken feed. It’s about carving a new niche of professional content that’s actually valuable to respective industries and the real needs of young professionals.
So far, the future of work in 2022 remains as chaotic as ever, with forecasts of office reopenings, larger shifts to hybrid work and innovations in remote operations hanging in the balance. Can LinkedIn Learning learn to incentivize a content creator ecosystem that would make it more popular? Microsoft would have to stop being greedy and actually invest more into the product.
If Microsoft misses the 2021 to 2023 opportunity in corporate Ed Tech, it could be too late.
LinkedIn Lacks Proper Incentives to Create a Viable Ed Tech Business
Mostly on LinkedIn, it’s all about boasting about supposed growth. As online learning continues to become one of the most viable ways to accelerate your career, they say they are seeing major increases in the amount of professional learning happening around the world. Over 4.6 million professionals watched the 20 Most Popular Courses this year, and compared to last year we saw a 53% increase in global hours spent learning.?Those are pretty terrible growth rates?considering the WFM environment. LinkedIn needs to be more accountable to Microsoft.
With Salesforce creating Salesforce +, Microsoft needs to double down on creator content and a valid educational platform. It’s not even clear if LinkedIn Learning is that platform, buried as it is within the LinkedIn product and app. Its visibility is minimal and even its top courses feel lackluster.
It’s not as if they are not trying. Some of the skills on this year’s list are hard skills in high demand like?Cloud Computing,?SQL, and?Cybersecurity. Other skills like strategic thinking?will never go out of style and?unconscious bias?that helps us create inclusive products and work environments.
But there’s virtually no social or community chatter about these courses or products. There’s no real buzz. LinkedIn continues to fail to monetize its user base properly, all the while boasting about its astounding growth in pointless metrics like views and total global number of users. It cannot even retain its most ardent content creators and Indie influencers.
Microsoft Needs to be Better in Professional Ed Tech
It doesn’t have a good product road map that’s integrated with Microsoft’s incredible reach to build a viable Ed Tech company. Instead with firm Ad growth, LinkedIn is slowly deteriorating after the Microsoft acquisition.
This is not altogether surprising. Subscription growth and Ad growth sort of grow by themselves in a platform of scale. The motivation to make LinkedIn Learning more legit is low to medium and Microsoft’s vision of becoming a corporate Ed Tech company is a slow burner.
With the Great Resignation you would have hoped for more. In previous years, the most popular courses primarily mirrored workplace trends and skills in emerging and enduring technology and people management. This year, the world of work looked very different and we see professionals learning skills to navigate where our professional and personal worlds collide. That at least is a positive sign.
Amid all the listicles and boasting about growth LinkedIn Learning needs a different mindset and product road map that actually integrates better with the rest of Microsoft products and ecosystem. It needs a creator content ecosystem that’s viable. In 2021 it doesn’t look like LinkedIn Learning, in its current state, is that product that can enable Microsoft to compete in the corporate and business Ed Tech sphere.
As for now in 2021, enjoy the listicles.
Global Incident Management & Communications at LivePerson
3 年Of they can, what’s stopped them so far?
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年Hari Srinivasan are you guys not talking to young people about how they envision the future of work or what they hope LinkedIn could be or something? You've tried video, stories, now Live courses, but without incentives what can you possibly expect?
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年Jeff Weiner the problem with cashing out is you end up like Skype before you know it. Microsoft could create an updated version of LinkedIn and likely have a better product (Microsoft Teams to Skype). Such a wasted opportunity here with mediocre product, engineering and ability to envision what the future of work will actually be like. LinkedIn is wealthy but lacks the motivation to envision the future.
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年Where does LinkedIn actually fit in the cloud Satya Nadella? Just an Ad-machine with a feed with incrementally less use to professionals? Just an online resume waiting to be disrupted? You have to do more if you want this acquisition to pan out.
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年Creating scale is meaningless if you don't' actually envision the future, keep up with it and lead it Reid Hoffman