How to Access Lynda.com #LinkedIn Learning for Free via your public library.

Many corporations pay for LinkedIn Learning so that their employees can keep up with important soft skills or technical skills, continuing education in a specialty. You can check with your HR department if they offer this perk.

Carpenteria, CA, USA - June 18, 2016: A Lynda.com coffee mug on a counter in a break room. Lynda.com is a subsidiary of Linkedin, a Microsoft Company.

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If you wonder if those soft skills are really valuable, the third annual 2019 Workplace Learning Report found some of the country’s fastest growing roles—sales development, customer success, and customer experience jobs—are largely soft skills-based. The most in-demand skill is Creativity, followed by Persuasion, Analytical reasoning, Collaboration, and, Flexible approach (a.k.a. Adaptability). If you thought all those soft skills were not needed in the workplace, think again. The online learning platform has all of these courses.

First step: Search your library system name and Lynda.com in any search engine and you should find details. Sample query: “Oakland public library Lynda.com” and the first result is the announcement from the main library page with appropriate links to sign up (presuming you live in that district, of course).

I went through a simple signup process at my county library to get an account and login. I have to make sure I login via that library-established account or the Lynda/LinkedIn system gets confused and tries to offer me a trial, so simply bookmark your access page.

Lynda.com App Screenshot

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Lynda.com still has its own page (again, for web access use your library link) and once you are logged in, you will be able to access their entire library of thousands of videos covering a wide range of business and technical topics. If you are trying to login via the Lynda.com mobile app on Android or iOS, there is an individual tab as well as an organization tab (see screenshot above) and it can be a little tricky here, so the user experience can vary here -- but I found by entering my library URL under this “Sign in with your organization portal” that it then popped up a new login screen. Numerous comments on the app review pages showed that contacting Lynda help or your library admin guides you to a solution. You can pull these videos up via Chromecast or Apple TV, too.

Second step: Browse the enormous online video course catalog here (this is the lengthy “all subjects” list on Lynda.com, but you can also just type in your specific interest area in their search bar once you are logged in.

That’s it. Power up your learning channel for free with Lynda’s deep list of professionally done videos. Learn all kinds of new skills to help you in your business, in your marketing, further enhance your negotiation chops. Spend some time to learn Final Cut Pro or audio mixing, Hootsuite or Google Analytics. There is so much here -- time to level up.