LinkedIn was always focuxed on helping professionals grow their careers – so last weeks announcement regarding the acquisition of online education company Lynda.com made total sense. First off some of my very first webdesign books were Lynda.com books from roughly 20 years ago – so it’s pleasant to see this company grow enough over the decades to be acquired by LinkedIn for $1.5 billion.
As the head of content products at LinkedIn, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the access to information and knowledge can be used to make professionals more productive and successful. The fact that I had to take a crash course to acquire a new professional skill is not unique to me — millions of professionals around the world are in a constant state of learning to achieve their professional goals every day.
So, I couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome the talented lynda.com team to the LinkedIn family today. Together, I believe we can make it even easier for professionals around the world to accelerate their careers and realize their potential through the learning and development of new skills. Today’s announcement that LinkedIn intends to acquire lynda.com allows us to take a meaningful step forward in building the Economic Graph, which you can read more about from our CEO Jeff Weiner’s post here.
lynda.com has an extensive library of premium video content, spanning hundreds of thousands of videos on a diverse set of professional topics across multiple languages. The service is used every day to help people accelerate their career.
As an avid LinkedIn user myself I can’t wait to see how Lynda.com will be integrated into the site. In the meantime if you haven’t checked out Lynda.com before – they make awesome videos and tutorials about well … everything. Here’s a quick sample below. You can also grab a free 10 day trial by heading over here.