LinkedIn Learning has become more useful for the Sheridan community during a pandemic.
Originally known as Lynda.com, LinkedIn Learning is an online resource that allows you to search and apply for jobs, connect with people of all ages from around the world, view courses and tutorials about a chosen subject, and more. It’s also free for Sheridan students.
Sheridan students aren’t the only ones who benefit from using this site. The Sheridan faculty also has free access to it at any time for connecting with graduates, getting guest speakers for their classes, job opportunities, class tutorials and more.
Teachers like Nathan Mallet, who teaches career management for Sheridan’s journalism program, use LinkedIn daily.
“I use it all the time. It’s probably the most useful resource for me as a professional. Certainly more so than any other social media platform. I don’t know what I’d do without it.
Nathan Mallet, Professor, Sheridan College
Nathan thinks that students should use this resource to help them with their future plans after college. He’s a big believer in students choosing their own career path and wants to encourage his students to follow their hearts. Nathan considers reaching out to career professionals and having conversations with them to be a key skill in professional development.
“ You have two choices: you can either wait around for those ones in a thousand want ads to come up or you can use resources, like LinkedIn, to find out who’s working in that field now and have conversations with them to find out how they get there, how would they advise you get there, are there any opportunities they can keep you oppressed on that kind of thing. So for people who want to be proactive about getting jobs, it’s the best way to go.”
Nathan Mallet, Professor, Sheridan College
Sheridan students are also finding this resource useful. With so many courses and tutorials to choose from, Sheridan students can find exactly what there looking for at any time.
“I did one with C# and one on Java,” said David Ojesekhoba, a Sheridan student in Software Development. “The [courses] I watched were easy to follow.”
After Ojesekhoba heard that LinkedIn Learning was provided for free to Sheridan students, he started using LinkedIn Learning to learn more about the topics related to his program. When he was looking for a co-op, he used LinkedIn Learning to his advantage.
“It was useful to sharpen up my skills and provide proof that I learned this specific programming language and topic,” explained Ojesekhoba.
He described LinkedIn Learning as his “first stop” for learning new topics for free. Before he used LinkedIn Learning, he said that he was using Udemy, which is a different online learning platform. However, he expressed that it was hard to get previews of the course before the payment and that limited his options for choosing which course he wanted to take.
So the easy accessibility and the variety of options, as well as the fact that it’s provided for free are the reason why he comes back when he wanted to learn something new online.
“There’s a lot of different creators, different creators teaching the same subject,” he shared. “It’s like how different profs resonate with different people. So if you don’t like one creator, then you can look through and see which one explains it best for you.”
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