Enroll in the 20 Most Popular LinkedIn Courses for Free This Month

Living through the past several months of the pandemic has changed so much about how and where we work — including whether we still have a job at all. If you’re fortunate enough to still be employed, this period may have caused you to reflect on your current position or entire career, and whether it really is the best use of your time and talent. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s time (or advisable) to give your notice and attempt to find something new right now.

But, it is a good opportunity to learn new skills or brush up on the ones that might be a little rusty. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, then you should know that for the month of September, the 20 most-popular LinkedIn Learning courses are available to take for free. Here’s what you need to know.

How to enroll in the free courses

There really isn’t an official enrollment process for these free LinkedIn Learning courses. In fact, you don’t even need a LinkedIn account to be able to access them. Just select a course that interests you from their list, click on the title, and you’re ready to go. The full list of all 20 courses (with links) can be found here. But to give you an idea of what’s on offer, here are the top 10 most popular courses as a sampling of what’s available.

Which courses are available?

1. Time Management: Working from Home

Instructor: Dave Crenshaw

Course description: With so many demands on your time and attention, it’s a tricky balancing act to stay productive. Learn how to set up a dedicated workspace for maximum productivity, collaborate with remote coworkers, craft your daily schedule, and how to use virtual meetings productively. It also offers advice for working parents and other caregivers who have to balance professional and personal responsibilities in the home.

2. Strategic Thinking 

Instructor: Dorie Clark

Course description: Strategic thinking is the ability to think on a big and small scale, long and short term, into the past and the present. This course teaches managers and leaders how to use strategic thinking to guide the direction of your teams and come up with solutions to key business problems.

3. Remote Work Foundations

Instructor: Mike Gutman

Course description: This course shows you how to use today’s cloud-based communication and collaboration tools to get work done from anywhere, while remaining connected to your organisation. Gutman reveals how you can create a productive work environment, avoid distractions, and build rapport with remote colleagues so you feel like you’re part of the team and succeed in your remote career.

4. Learning Python

Instructor: Joe Marini

Course description: Python — the popular and highly readable object-oriented language — is both powerful and relatively easy to learn. Whether you’re new to programming or an experienced developer, this course can help you get started with Python. Senior Development Advocate at Google, Joe Marini, provides an overview of the installation process, basic Python syntax, and an example of how to construct and run a simple Python program. Learn to work with dates and times, read and write files, and retrieve and parse HTML, JSON, and XML data from the web.

5. Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

Instructor: Gemma Leigh Roberts

Course description: Emotional intelligence can help you build effective relationships at work. Executive coach and organizational psychologist Gemma Roberts explains what emotional intelligence is and why it’s important. She helps you become more self-aware so that you can identify triggers that may hijack your performance. She also helps you align your intentions and your impact so that you can build strong and collaborative relationships.

6. Excel 2016 Essential Training

Instructor: Dennis Taylor

Course description: Start mastering Excel, the world’s most popular and powerful spreadsheet program, with Excel expert Dennis Taylor. Learn how to best enter and organise data, perform calculations with simple functions, work with multiple worksheets, format the appearance of your data and cells, and build charts and PivotTables. Other lessons cover the powerful IF, VLOOKUP, and COUNTIF family of functions; the Goal Seek, Solver, and other data analysis tools; and automating tasks with macros.

7. Excel Essential Training (Office 365)

Instructor: Dennis Taylor

Course description: Get up to speed with Microsoft Excel, the world’s most popular spreadsheet program. Follow along with Excel expert Dennis Taylor as he demonstrates how to efficiently manage and analyse data with this powerful program. Learn how to enter and organise data, perform calculations with simple functions, and format the appearance of rows, columns, cells, and data.

8. Communicating with Confidence

Instructor: Jeff Ansell

Course description: Most people are afraid of speaking in public, but effective oral communication is a key skill in business. Jeff Ansell provides simple communication tools, strategies, and tips that are easy to use and produce immediate results. He’ll help you sound more confident, use body and language to better express ideas, and overcome anxiety.

9. Cert Prep: Project Management Professional (PMP)®

Instructor: Sandra Mitchell

Course description: In today’s competitive workplace, effective project managers are critical to the bottom line. The PMP demonstrates your mastery, your experience, and your education. Discover what it takes to pass the PMP exam by following along with project manager and exam prep trainer Sandy Mitchell.

10. Project Management Foundations

Instructor: Bonnie Biafore

Course description: Project management is a set of techniques that anyone can apply to achieve goals and make projects more successful. Project management can be used to guide small, simple projects as well as complex enterprise-wide initiatives. In this course, Biafore explains the fundamentals of project management, from establishing project goals and objectives and building a project plan to managing resources and work, meeting deadlines, and closing the project.

Looking for more? Courses 11-20 can be found here.