Welcome to the Diversifying Your Skills series! Learning new skills in your life and career can be really rewarding—but challenging at the same time. What does it mean to realize you’re missing a skill for your career or, worse, life? How can you best learn new skills? I’ll be answering those questions and more in this weekly series. You can read past articles in this series here.
In my final article of this series, I want to focus on a specific aspect of diversifying your skills: when you’ve come to the conclusion that you need to learn something new, where do you actually go to learn it?
Primarily, I think most skills are best learned from doing: if you want to learn to be more patient, you simply have to work on it everyday. If you want to learn how to make better graphics on Canva, you should work on making graphics everyday and getting feedback. However, there are some really great places to learn skills that are more high-level. Let’s talk about them!
1. Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a great place for kids to learn extra lessons about math and science. But if you’re an adult, there are some great courses as well for Computer Programming, Economics, History, and more. I love doing Khan Academy courses to brush up on basic skills—prime example, when I was working on my books recently, I did the personal finance lesson to help brush up on some things I forgot. Khan Academy is free for users, which makes it even better.
2. Skillshare
Skillshare is another great option and it has 2 tiers: a Free account, which gives you access to all the Free classes; and a Premium Account, which gives you full access to everything. I have a free account at the moment and I love it—I’ve taken great classes on using my DLSR (something I want to get better at!), marketing, and more. All for free.
However, if you want to upgrade to Premium, it does seem worth it to get access to more classes.
3. Lynda
Lynda is owned by LinkedIn now, which should tell you everything you need to know about it: if you need new skills with a business or tech focus, then Lynda is the place to go. Back in the day (2013, I think), where I worked at the time had a free Lynda membership for employees, so I would spend my days doing courses on Microsoft Word, Excel, everything that employers were suspicious of me having experience in. (Side note: one time an interviewer fully interrogated me about “when” I learned to use Microsoft Excel. Like, 3rd grade computer class? For older people, it seemed bizarre that I just knew how to use Excel because it always existed for me! But I digress.)
Lynda is a paid subscription, but you can get a free month to test it out. A standard plan is $29.99, but if you pay annually, it works out to $19.99.
