My Journey as LinkedIn Technical Instructor

This post is a place where I will share my experience, and everything I write will be about my journey and my opinions about the platform and especially what I learn during this journey.
I will update this post regularly after each new important step.
I suggest you come back here from time to time to read this post if you want updates.

What is LinkedIn Learning?

Let's start with the basics. Maybe you all just know LinkedIn Learning but if the name is new to anyone, I will now tell you more about what it is.

LinkedIn Learning is a learning platform with three content main categories: Business, Creative, Technology.
Of course, there a lot of subcategories inside each main category.

There a lot of free content but with you can access to everything buying a subscription.
If you have Microsoft Viva Learning at work, you can also access to the LinkedIn Learning content from the application.
You can find the list of the free courses available on Microsoft Viva Learning: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/learning/linkedin-learning-free-courses

How to join LinkedIn Learning as an instructor

There are several ways to join LinkedIn Learning as an instructor.
At this link https://learning.linkedin.com/en-us/instructors you can find an application form to apply as a teacher on the platform.
If you are not confident with your English, there a lot of content in other languages and also in the application form you can select your preferred language to create content.
I think there is a long waiting list, but you can try it.

Another way to join the LinkedIn family is to be referred by an existing LinkedIn Learning instructor.
Check if someone in your friends circle is inside the platform and asking

In my case, a content manager reached out to me after seeing my GitHub Star nomination and asked if I would be interested in creating a course with LinkedIn.

This is the first email from the LinkedIn Content Manager

But it's not easy as you can imagine, take a look at the next chapter

A sample video lesson

To discover if you are a good instructor, there is no other way to check it in the real field.
The content manager asked me to record a short video (3-5 minutes) about something I would like to teach to someone.
At that time I chose GitFlow because I did a few weeks before a lot of lessons about it and it's one of my favorite topic in the last 3-4 years.
For recording the video I used Camtasia and all my stuff that I used to live streaming on Twitch.
If you want to know more about my setup, you can go here.
The first attempt was a failure because I was so nervous and the result was really bad, honestly.
After few days the content manager came back to me with a "No, please try to do it again and try to write down a short script before recording".
And BOOOOM!
The result was more fluent and not so very bad like the first one.
They accepted my sample video at the second shot.

If you want to try, it's not easy and recording video needs to be patient and trying again and again.
Two times is not so much.

The Table of Contents

In my case the topic was chosen by my content manager but I had the opportunity to choose a specific topic from many and I had choose "Git and GitHub".

After this hard choice, I started to create the real "Table of Contents"
This is new kind of activity for me because I never did a real table of contents for my blog posts or for my articles.
It's really hard but I found inspiration from other courses and articles on internet.
I tried to insert something new and something old concepts.
What I found really hard during this activity is to find a flow through all the chapters.

For each chapter, you have to write a title and a summary keeping in mind that the results should be a video with 4-5 minutes duration.
It seems easy but it's not.

Scripting

When the Table of Contents are ready and approved by the Content Manager, LinkedIn chooses for you a producer.
A producer is an awesome person who will assist you during all the phases starting from this one.
They help you to writing and reviewing the scripts and also assist you during the recording phases.
They are coaches, not there to control you.
Generally, you have to write 400 to 500 words because is the average of words for a video with 4-5 duration.
Of course, this is not a written rule and it depends from the chapter topic.
For instance, an intro video should be shorter than the others.

I have tried some methods to write a good track without doing much rework.
I have tried to writing down a chapter from scratch, with Word.
It worked for me but I was really slow and I did a lot of rephrasing to have a good speech flow.

But the method that I like the most is to use the "Dictate" mode of Microsoft Word Online.

This feature is present only in the online version, but you can use it for free.
My method to write a good speech is trying to speak as in a normal speech with people. It's more my comfort zone and it's easier for me to write more words instead of 100-200 words for a chapter.
I have to stop after a while or I write too much.

I received also a recommendation from my producer in one of our conversations.
The producer told me to write down at least the topics that I would like to talk about within the current video.
So, I open a notepad before every new chapter, and I try to find the key topics.
One row for each topic and when I speak to Word, I try to go through the points.

Swags

Geek gadgets are always a good idea and a perfect motivator
Before I signed the contract, I asked to my Content Manager if they can send me something related to LinkedIn Learning like t-shirts, stickers and much more.

After a few weeks I received in my mailbox a package with these stuff inside!
I love them!

As you can see in my picture below, I use the sticker on my private laptop.

This post is a place where I will share my experience, and everything I write will be about my journey and my opinions about the platform and especially what I learn during this journey.
I will update this post regularly after each new important step.
I suggest you come back here from time to time to read this post if you want updates.

To be continued...