This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be in: desired from both sides of the equation (Job Seekers and Recruiters/Talent Sourcers).
I think we can do better this time. I'm optimistic that these new "certifications" will be ways to continue learning after higher education, or a way for people who didn't have that opportunity to learn gainful skills
I've heard a few Jeff Weiner speeches, and he's very big about connecting and improving human capital. This is him putting his money where his mouth is.
I think this is exactly right. If you look at what's going on at education in general right now, "credentialing" is one of the top challenges for education startups. Particularly for MOOCs but also for bootcamps. How are hiring managers supposed to know which certificates mean something or which classes actually teach people something? LinkedIn's revenue right now is all about services to make recruiting easier.
Some certs mean nothing, but some of the MOOCs do apparently earn you some credence.
I know the NSA, for instance, regards completing Coursera's Data Science specialization [0] as at least noteworthy enough to mention it in their Data Science job listings.
Back in 2001 I asked my manager about taking Microsoft certified classes to earn a Microsoft developer certificate. He told me it was a waste of time as all of the tests for it are on file sharing networks and Microsoft doesn't change their tests often enough so people study the pirated tests and then pay for the exams and get certified without knowing the material.
At least that was his reason for not supporting me and getting money for me to take classes on it.
I was already a very good Visual BASIC programmer. I earned a reputation for debugging other people's code and fixing databases in SQL Server.
They would have comp sci bachelor of science holders, who could not even program. I had to train them in Visual BASIC to get them started. I only had an Associates because I could not afford a Bachelors.
I take MOOC classes for free, so I don't get certified, but at least I learn new skills.
I agree that some certifications are out of style, specifically in programming because you can glean so much more data about a candidate from their code rather than a certification.
However, in other areas, if the certification is sufficiently difficult to attain such as Cisco's networking certificates, or where you can't assign a task or review past work to determine an individual's skill level I think certifications can be helpful even in a startup hiring environment.
For example, if you are applying as a product management and have relatively junior experience but you have a great feel for our product and market I would still be potentially worried about how well you can interface with a team. So seeing a certification around SCRUM or Agile, in this particular case will certainly be helpful.
For startups, I agree: certificates mean nothing. In fact, they can be a detriment as the certificates cause an increase in pay that may not be affordable in a startups budget. Plus since startups tend to live on the bleeding edge, there tend to not be certificates for newer technologies like golang. For large enterprises, I believe it gives them the peace of mind that the new hire has at least basic skills in a technology.
For tech roles this effect is compounded by the fact that, in a startup, the person doing the hiring is likely to be technical themselves so they can quickly work out whether someone has basic skills, whereas in a bigger company HR likely can't do so as easily.
Does MCSE still pull weight? Are there newer certifications that matter now?
What fields do you think will benefit from this certification? In design (one of Lynda's pillars), half of hireability is portfolio. I suppose in production roles, you'd want to know you're hiring technically proficient people, but that too you can mostly tell from the work.
Perhaps this works as well, or better, from the angle of "People who had this skill got looked at 3x more than you. Go get that skill."
I think in some realms MCSE does pull some weight, such as large financial institutions and non-tech companies. There are newer certificates such as those from Coursera and Udacity that are starting to pull more and more weight from the industry, mainly tech though.
The main fields that benefit from this are business and technology. Human resources and recruiters tend not to be technical: they have no idea if you actually know Java or not. They simply know you have it on your resume. This gives them at least some peace of mind that you know at least some Java. Conversely, Business people can be evaluated on whether they know how to do basic things like rate of return or efficiency metrics.
This does help in that realm, but it helps in giving some people confidence as well. Some people have imposters syndrome so a certificate saying they know it alleviates that feeling.
Depends where you are in your career. I've heard it claimed that an MCSE can be a stand-in for a degree (yes, I know that makes no sense, but I mean from a recruiter's perspective when reviewing a candidate's overall qualifications, rather than relating to technical skill/knowledge).
So in your first 1-10 years? It might help. I will say eventually you have to remove an MCSE from your CV/resume as it does more harm than good (e.g. if you had a Server 2000 MCSE on your CV right now, it's just going to make you look out of touch).
> Are there newer certifications that matter now?
Timeless is key(!).
A cert' which is tied to a specific piece of software only helps you while that software is relevant. So getting a cert on something like Project Management, Project Planning, or a broad cert' on security (with a focus on policy, not systems like CISSP or Security+).
That's why degrees are a no-brainer. They're always timeless. People list their degree in their first and last job. Few certs survive more than fifteen some odd years.
It shows you haven't done anything worthwhile for 14 years(!). If you have to pad your CV out with stuff you know won't be relevant, then you're in a weak position professionally (or are just too lazy to update your CV, which might be worse).
A lot of older employees (late 40s or 50s) make this mistake. They leave experience on their CV which is not relevant because it is twenty or more years old, and then wonder why they struggle to find work.
Look, someone somewhere might legitimately want an SCO Unix expert or something to migrate them from Netware or NT 4.0 but in those rare cases customise your CV to put that experience back on, rather than making it the default for a lot of businesses that just don't care.
I'm in my 40s and been on disability since 2003. My skills are out of date, and I've been out of work for far too long.
Been trying to learn the new technology, but knowing the old technology makes learning the new technology easier.
I haven't updated my resume in a long time, been meaning to do so. Still list Novell Netware, Commodore Amiga, COBOL, Wordperfect, Visual BASIC 6.0 etc and never updated the resume since 2001 or so. But I never handed out my resume because I've been disabled. Time to trim off the old stuff and add on my new experiences.
Actually that is spot on. The problem of the line is that it shows something positive ( got a cert 14 years ago ), but also something negative ( there have been 4 generations of servers in the meanwhile, where are the cert )
Obviously that is easy to explain in an interview, the problem is getting the interview in the first place. Resume are not analysed, they are scanned by irrational human, sensible to effect similar to https://xkcd.com/641/
I had always heard that MCSE was considered a joke. I've heard positive things about RHCE and some of the Cisco networking certs, but I haven't been around that world for several years now.
Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or laziness. Both of which are indicators of somebody you don't want to hire!
LinkedIn's head must be operating in oldschool mode of certificates actually meaning something. They don't. Unless they're HARD to get, really hard. And if they are, then you are better off going to a real college/university where you can get realtime feedback and support.
What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly...
> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly...
The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes.
I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.
Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford?
Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide.
Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.
Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for.
Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove?
Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet.
That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.
No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all.
Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that.
I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid.
They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning.
I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b.
[1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition!
[2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it...
Oh, wait.
EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility.
EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"
Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees?
People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value.
Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).
I would see Lynda as being more valuable for specific software packages like Adobe Illustrator. Videos teaching programming don't really fit my learning model. I really need to build and tweak to learn. A walkthrough like on video seems better suited to software packages.
I take statistical mechanics classes for fun on Coursera. I learn what Powerpoint buttons to push to make an animation from Lynda. I do not ever in my life want to spend ten weeks listening to lectures about Powerpoint. I want to get my Powerpoint crap done as fast as possible, and Lynda is pretty useful for those job skills.
Lots of practical vocational skills that fill in the gaps of an academic track.
> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda?
Depends on how diverse said programmer would like to be. Maybe there's a tidbit about being a real estate broker or plumber or data-entry drone that some working programmer re-maps to a problem they've been chewing on for months.
My $0.02: Being open to new experiences and having an always-on learning POV goes a long way to fertilize success.
I didn't know how to write a line of PHP or MySQL (previously a frontend designer/developer). I went through a couple of the courses on Lynda because I had an idea for a project I wanted to develop. I started writing backend code for the project within a week of starting the Lynda tutorials to practice what I was learning. The project started gaining traction and users a couple of weeks after that, and I quit my job a year later. Today, it generates about 70k a year in passive income.
Lynda brought me from not knowing how to declare a variable, to being able to develop a simple site with a database, user registration, commenting, administrative pages, etc, in a very short period of time. It's a great resource to hit the ground running in a week. However, like you said, you then need to to grow using other resources to learn how to sprint.
Take is as someone who has been teaching himself how to code, Lynda, Codecademy, even Udacity are not going to cut it. These are good if you want to play at coding. But if you want to do anything serious, you'll have to check out actual lecture videos and books.
For example, I was trying to figure out linked lists and the best resources were either from solo Youtubers, or a couple of videos uploaded by MIT and IIT (in India)
