Boost Your Professional Development with Lynda

Did you know that all Macquarie staff and students have exclusive access to Lynda.com? It’s an excellent online learning platform with a huge range of courses covering education, technology, professional skills and creative skills, which can help boost your professional development.

Launched at Macquarie in 2016, Lynda.com gives you access to over 6500 professional learning courses, including 11,000+ videos, with 30-40 new videos added each week. Prominent figures and the highest level subject matter experts from both the academic and business world are authors of the content, including professors from world leading institutions.

Students are the most frequent users at Macquarie (the most popular courses are on Critical Thinking, Excel and programming), but there is a wealth of great material that staff can delve into – for inspiration, to get unstuck on a problem or to help foster certain soft skills, like communicating with confidence, developing good body language or how to have difficult conversations.

Don’t think you have enough time to take advantage? Here’s some tips:

1. Download the videos and listen like a podcast on your commute to campus

2. Block out a specific time each week in your calendar as professional development time

3. Just dip in, for short periods, say in a coffee break, for inspiration or to spark an idea

Log into Lynda.com by clicking “sign in with your organisation portal” and sign in with your MQ OneID.

You can search by Course Type, Skill Level, Duration (if you only have 2 mins, you can search that!), Subject, Software, Companies, Authors, or Learning Paths.

Just have to look around and find courses and content that ‘speaks to you’! 😀

After a quick search I found some courses you may be interested in having a look at (this list is just skimming the surface, but it gives you an idea of the types of content):

Teaching techniques and tips

Tech Skills for Staff

Communication, leadership and personal development

Really, the possibilities are endless – so go and explore.

Not only can you use Lynda.com for your own professional development, students can participate in thousands of courses to build key skills. If you were thinking of developing video content for your course, check if there’s already a Lynda video on that subject, to save you time and effort. You can link to videos in iLearn like a regular URL. You can also create playlists for your class, which they can use like set readings. And Lynda videos are also discoverable in Multisearch!

Check out the library’s libguides for Lynda for more information.

If you want to keep up with new content, check out the weekly wrap up of new courses on the Linkedin Learning Blog (Linkedin bought Lynda.com last year).

If you’re curious – these are the top 20 most viewed courses at Macquarie over the last year (note, students currently make up over 80% of active users)

If you’ve found a course you think would be useful for other Macquarie staff, share the title and/or link in the comments!