I was in my last year of college when the pandemic hit.
It definitely sucked.
I couldn’t see my friends, classes felt draining, and news about the virus didn’t help either. I was just lucky to have the privilege of staying home without having to worry about the bills. For people who were stuck in a similar situation as me, it sucked.
But it did have some merit.
The first made itself known to me: I had time.
Time was a hot commodity for me.
My regular commute to and from school took around 45 minutes at best, and 3 hours at worst. I was also an active student who joined school organizations, held down a scholarship for a few semesters, and had some side projects too. The remainder of my hours was spent trying to catch up on sleep, or to race a deadline.
That was all gone when COVID happened.
I only had to focus on my classes to graduate. I was getting antsy and worried. Then, my school suddenly suspended classes for about a month. They delayed the graduation as well. This was in hopes that we would be able to have an in-person ceremony.
(Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen.)
Now with my classes suspended, I scrambled for ways to use my days productively. I was about to graduate, but I felt like I wasn’t ready for anything.
I knew that I needed to be more competitive to secure a job. I’ll be freshly unemployed amidst a global pandemic. Anyone could apply to their dream company regardless of the distance.
After some thought, I decided that I could learn something new and develop my existing skills.
So I took to YouTube.
It didn’t take long before I realized that watching these may not give me the edge that I wanted. It also took a lot out of me to find in-depth content, and viewing videos from various creators makes collating information confusing.
My learning path on YouTube was unclear and disorganized.
Lo and behold, online courses.
I was not new to online courses, but I had always looked to it as a last resort.
These platforms usually required you to purchase a lecture before being granted access. It’s like finding a diamond in the rough to unearth free lessons with quality content. But I had time on my side for once.
I decided to look into the thick of it.
Browsing website after website, I had finally struck gold: LinkedIn Learning.
It was right under my nose.
I had been updating my profile when the site itself notified me to try their premium version for a limited time. I didn’t care about it at first until I recalled that they did have a learning platform.
Soon after, I discovered that you can have access to all of LinkedIn’s courses on LinkedIn Premium. You wouldn’t have to buy each course separately.
So that gave me the brain fart of the century: to speedrun LinkedIn Learning.
I could use the 30-day free trial, and do as many courses as I can.
That sounded great!
Though thinking about it, speeding through chunks of information will feel like suffering. I don’t think that I’d be able to stuff that much knowledge in my head in a month without regrets.
The solution? I called a friend.
Somehow, she agreed to join me. Why suffer alone when you can suffer together? Our classes were suspended, so we could definitely take advantage of what the platform had to offer.
It was like the stars aligned.
You have 30 days to take notes.
So I planned a little schedule in my head, picking what I wanted to learn within the month. I categorized the courses into two sections: mandatory and nice-to-haves.
I would take what I considered mandatory first, and these were those related to the field I wanted to get into professionally. Then I would shift to taking the nice-to-have courses as a reprieve when I felt burnt out from game development.
Besides the mental checklist I had, I didn’t have that much of a game plan besides watching lessons at a higher speed. I would also pause it to write down notes.
My handwriting eventually got worse since I was listening more, and looking at the paperless. For anyone attempting a speed run, I would suggest typing your notes instead. Or whatever floats your boat, really. It’s all up to you.
My 30-day trial went by quickly.
I initially thought that this was going to be another bad idea, but it wasn’t. Both my friend and I fared quite well and the results speak for themselves.
I was able to complete a total of 12 online courses. I have 9 proudly displayed on my LinkedIn profile and my friend currently has 5 courses on hers.
I think I did well with the time I had.
I picked up a lot of new things at the cost of nothing but my time and effort.
Besides improving in my field of expertise, I was also able to learn practical skills like personal finances, management, and other interesting topics outside of my field. I found that the job interview course I took was a little nice to have as the most practical one. I even managed to apply what I learned from it to get my current job!
The bottom line: this won’t work for everyone.
Online courses don’t work for every person, and not everyone has the time. We all learn differently, and our life situations are all unique.
And that’s perfectly fine.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, my circumstances were extraordinary to be able to take advantage of LinkedIn Learning. I also wouldn’t advise going too fast to the point where you’re barely registering for the lecture.
That would defeat the purpose of doing all of this. I don’t think you could say that you’ve taken advantage of the 30-day trial that way.
Having more credentials is great on your resume, but making sure you’re actually knowledgeable and have the skills to show for it is more important. After all, how are you supposed to get a job that you don’t know how to do?
In the end, I had fun learning new things and having a friend alongside this brain fart of an adventure. I hope that this helped you out, opened up your mind to trying some online courses, or at least gave you some insights on your next learning journey.