How to unlock LinkedIn learning for free
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LinkedIn has been constantly updating its services over the years to add new features and tools to help those within the platform not only connect but gather data insights, upskill, find jobs and so much more.
LinkedIn Learning has been around for some time, you can access this product using the ‘9 square’ tab on the top right of your browser. Depending on your subscription model, the learning platform might already be unlocked for you, if it is, this article will not be relevant. However, if you find yourself not able to access this content, continue reading as we will show you how you can gain access to parts of this service completely free.
In more recent years LinkedIn Learning has been growing like crazy, consider this, if you search for ‘JavaScript’ on the educational platform, Udemy you get around 10,000 hits back. If you run the same search on LinkedIn, you will have around 7,400 results. Now consider this, LinkedIn Learning is a sub-division of LinkedIn and not their core business, whereas Udemy solely focuses on video learning content.
As with most SaaS-based products, paywalls are a thing, LinkedIn Learning is no different. Some of the videos will be free to access, but generally, the better-quality videos and the ones you will likely learn the most from will be stuck behind the paywall.
So how do we access them?
Step 1 — Head over to skills and endorsements
What you will need to do first is go to your personal profile. Access this by clicking your photo and then the ‘view profile’ tab.
Once here, scroll until you see the sub-section ‘Skills & endorsements’. Under the heading will be a tab marked ‘Take skill quiz’, clicking this will bring you to a window that will let you take a number of skill assessments to earn badges which can be displayed on your LinkedIn profile.
A lot of the assessments are currently focused on design and technology, scroll through and find the assessment(s) relevant to yourself.
Step 2 — Take a quiz
Once you have identified which assessment(s) are right for you, you can either practice before you start the assessment or dive right into the quiz.
From my own experiences, all quizzes seem to follow the same structure. 15 multiple choice questions with around 90 seconds per question, to successfully obtain the badge you must score in the top % out of all those who have taken the assessment.
To access the free LinkedIn Learning content, fail the quiz in good fashion.
Step 3 — LinkedIn recommendations
Once you have failed, LinkedIn will then divert you to LinkedIn Learning, along with recommended content you should watch to help pass the same quiz next time. When I failed the JavaScript quiz, I was recommended 10 courses via LinkedIn Learning, 8 of which were previously behind a paywall.
Step 4 — Access your content
The only downside to this method however is that you only have 24 hours to complete the course once started, and LinkedIn Learning has further restrictions such as a course can only be unlocked once, and you can only unlock 10 courses per month or 5 within a 24-hour period.
So be mindful when using this trick, make sure you have ample time to digest the courses once unlocked.
It might be a trick that is patched at some stage, but whilst it is still around it might be worth exploring. You might also realise that the content shared in LinkedIn Learning is of quality you wouldn’t mind paying for anyway, regardless as always if you feel this article could be beneficial to someone else, we would be grateful if you could share it around your network.
