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LinkedIn, the social network for professionals at Microsoft, takes a big step towards professional development and education. Before that, the company took over Lynda.com for a billion and a half dollars. This is now the anchor for LinkedIn Learning, which is being expanded twice today.

LinkedIn now offers more than 13,000 courses on its platform and announces two developments to help people use it. Now you can find videos, tutorials and courses from third parties. Think of Treehouse and the publishing house of the Harvard Business School. In addition, people who use LinkedIn Learning – both students and teachers – are able to ask and answer questions around their LinkedIn Learning sessions.

Publicly available

Unlimited access to LinkedIn Learning is part of a Premium Career subscription, which costs 30 euros per month. At the same time, a company can also take out a business team subscription to the Learning service. Many customers are not there yet of that business team subscription: around 11,000. How much traffic they generate together is not known. However, LinkedIn states that there has been a 64 percent increase in the number of people paying for Learning courses since it was made available in 2017.

James Raybould, product director of LinkedIn Learning, states that third parties will join the service relatively slowly at first. A handful of partner companies are immediately given the opportunity to integrate their products and services with LinkedIn Learning. Over time, there will be a public API, which will make it possible for anyone to add content. At the moment, however, LinkedIn chooses to work as a kind of curator to go there.

New material

Harvard Business Publishing material includes getAbstract (a service that offers book summaries and TED talks) and Big Think (500 short videos on contemporary topics). Treehouse also offers coding courses and product design skills. Creative Live joins the other two companies with courses for people active in the creative sector.

The options that have been added fit well within the material that LinkedIn already offers and also feel like an extension of the already existing offer in the newsfeed. That’s a conscious decision; we have a lot of information about the network, also about engagement, says Raybould. LinkedIn’s algorithms also offer advice on what material to add.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.