Lynda.com’s new Learning Path program plans the courses needed to land the job you want

Lynda.com has launched a program called Learning Paths to help you land your next job, curating its courses by specific job titles. The idea is to give you a starting point to learn more about a particular profession. To start, the online education company offers 53 job titles with multiple courses listed under each one — you can think of it almost like requirements for a college major.

Learning Paths are structured to give you step-by-step instructions on how to become a photographer, front-end developer, accountant, project manager, or anything else. The number of courses for each path varies based on profession, but all of them come from Lynda.com’s library which currently has a catalog of 4,200 courses in English.

With Learning Paths, you have a new way to access the company’s content, however, you’re still able to select individual courses, if you prefer.

The titles were chosen based on data pulled from the company’s LinkedIn parent. According to Arthur Nicholls, the senior product manager for learning experiences, Lynda looked at popular roles in the workforce, and asked — What skills and education would you need to obtain a job in that particular field?

Once a course or Learning Path is completed, you’ll receive a digital certificate that can be attached to your LinkedIn profile.

At first glance, it may seem that what the company is doing is re-skinning its content or simply organizing it differently. But you have to think about the objective. Previously, you knew what course you wanted to take, but the long-term goal wasn’t immediately visible. Or you might have known what career you want, but you didn’t know where to start or what skills are needed. That’s where Learning Paths comes in. “People are looking for a point of view on how to move forward,” Nicholls explained. “We’re going from a library to giving people a real pathway forward.”

After you’ve completed a path, Nicholls hopes that you’ll be better educated about the profession, which will help you determine subsequent courses you may want to take. So if you’ve studied to be a designer, after completing the path, you might be able to narrow it down further: front-end designer, art director, illustrator, etc.?

Although there is some small integration with LinkedIn in terms of understanding what careers people are looking for and what skills they have, you won’t be seeing any difference in job postings that may appear in your News Feed or other parts of the professional social network.

Nicholls believes that offering people better education choices will lead to improved economic opportunities, which fits right into LinkedIn’s economic graph: “As people learn new skills, it can create more opportunity for others, thereby closing the skills gap.”

Although Lynda.com is also available in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese, Learning Paths are currently only available in English. What’s more, it is only available via the web, but it is fully responsive to view in a mobile browser. Learning Paths are part of the core Lynda.com subscription.