Lynda.com

It’s a digital age and digital skills are no longer a necessity only to the tech wizards of the world or those big-dreaming, Elon Musk-styled careerists who dared look to the future to get ahead.  The future, as I’m sure you’re all well aware, is now, and these skills are a requisite for any professional to survive, let alone thrive in this perpetually dynamic, technologically driven culture.  As the technology available to us continues to rise, the base of knowledge expected of us as job candidates simultaneously rises, and with that comes the pressure or temptation to stretch the truth on resumes or even lie outright about the things we can or can’t do.

Fortunately for us, and every employer who will have the distinct honor of hiring us, USC kindly includes somewhere in our tuition expenses access to a website called Lynda.com, which provides the opportunity to actually learn the software of which we are expected to possess advanced knowledge.  Lynda offers online courses on virtually (pun intended) every type of computer software imaginable.  It has over 3,000 full courses on various programs and over 100,000 individual video tutorials taught at beginner, intermediate or advanced levels.

And the offerings on Lynda aren’t limited just to professional software like Office or Quickbooks.  It also has extensive tutorials in graphic design, coding languages, photography, education, even big data analytics, and quite a bit more.  If you want to learn anything further about the courses available on Lynda (and you do), or better yet, take one of them (you definitely do), you just need to log on to Blackboard and click the link from the homepage.  From there, choose a software, find a tutorial suitable for your skill level, and get started.

-Derek Belle