Five unexpected things you can learn through LinkedIn Learning 

Did you know you can access LinkedIn Learning for free with your Yarra Libraries membership? With formalised courses and certified professional trainers, LinkedIn Learning is a great resource to learn skills in a way that’s more structured than a mish mash of ten minute YouTube tutorials.  

What some of you might not know is that their catalogue is a lot wider than just computer programming and marketing courses for the aspiring professional. So today we’re going to take a deep dive and look at five things you can learn on LinkedIn Learning that may just surprise you. 

Jazz piano 

There’s music lessons on here? You may be surprised to find that there’s courses on everything from “recording a horn section” to “expanding your vocal range”, to FM synthesis, to tutorials on software packages ranging from Ableton to ProTools, GarageBand or Logic. Whether you dabble in music as a hobby or you’re a working professional looking to upskill on the minutiae of virtual instruments in your favourite digital audio workstation, there’s bound to be something for any music lover here.  

Artificial intelligence for marketing 

As someone who works in marketing I’m going to be honest and say this one sounds way above my pay grade, but for any of you marketers looking to speed up the singularity by teaming up with SkyNet and figuring out this course, here it is! Meanwhile, I noticed there’s a programming foundations course on “Lego Mindstorms” robots which sounds a little more my speed.  

How to network when you don’t like networking 

Sign me up! Soft skills are criminally underrated, so it’s great to see that you can use LinkedIn Learning as a resource to hone some of those areas. Got some difficult conversations coming up at work? There’s also a course on “communicating with diplomacy and tact”.  

Acrylic painting 

This is another one of those surprisingly analogue creative skills you can learn through LinkedIn Learning. You could go the other way and find courses here on how to create artwork in Procreate, Adobe Fresco, Photoshop, or go 3D with Maya, Unity or a variety of other software packages – but nothing beats the real thing, right? BYO paint brush!   

Advanced Microsoft Word skills 

You may think we’re kidding here, but we’ve all been in that situation where you can’t figure out how to add page numbers in a certain spot, the image in your document stubbornly refuses to move, or something really weird is happening with the header field! They could probably call these types of courses “how to be the most popular person in the office” because everyone is going to want to be your friend when you know how to do these things. You could apply a similar philosophy to Excel – we all use it, but do we actually know how to use it? How do you make those columns stay put or add conditional formatting? What is a macro and how can it speed up your workflow? Let’s find out! 


That’s all we’ve got for today. One more time - you can use this resource (and many others) for FREE if you have a Yarra Libraries membership, so if you’re not a member yet let’s get that fixed! Come in to any of our five branches or start the membership process online today.