by Charlotte Yarkoni – Corporate Vice President, Cloud + AI
At Microsoft, we’re building a “learn it all” culture where we aim to embrace curiosity, focus on being resourceful, and take our learnings and apply them for future success.
In that light, learning is more important than ever, and our goal is to help make technical learning even more accessible to everyone who wants to acquire a new skill, chase a new career path, and stay up-to-date on the latest technological advances. As we announced yesterday, Microsoft and LinkedIn are making a broad commitment to help students, job seekers and employees gain the skills they need to be successful in today’s digital-first economy.
Microsoft Learn is an integral part of our skilling experience – it’s a free online learning platform that combines short step-by-step trainings, browser-based interactive coding and scripting environments, and task-based achievements to help learners advance their technical skills and prepare for certifications. From Azure to Microsoft 365 and Power Platform to Dynamics 365 and more, we offer training that can help everyone learn – from students to job seekers to professionals. Learners and organizations can personalize their experience by building and sharing customized training collections and can use bookmarks to easily find and return to content. Throughout the learning journey, learners can earn points, levels, and unlock badges, and can easily share their progress with colleagues and on social media.
With more than 4 million learners registering in the less than two years since its launch, we’ve been humbled and inspired to see the adoption and engagement from the community. And in the last few months, as people have transitioned to work from home, we’ve seen a spike in Microsoft Learn usage, with users engaging with 192% more learning modules from January through May of this year compared to last year.
We’re continuing to invest in the Microsoft Learn platform, where learners will find:
- More than 225 learning paths. Collections of modules are organized around specific roles and technologies.
- More than 1,000 modules. The building blocks of the Microsoft Learn experience, a module is a course that contains videos, labs and articles.
- Role-based learning for 17 roles. For example, software developer, AI engineer, data scientist and solutions architect.
- Training aligned to 35 Microsoft certifications. Earning certifications shows you are keeping pace with today’s technical roles and requirements. Certification exams can be taken online, and users can easily share their certifications on their LinkedIn profile. Later this year, we will offer discounted certification exams for those impacted by COVID-19.
- More than 160 instructor-led training courses. Access deep technical training, taught by Microsoft-certified trainers, bringing you and your team customizable learning solutions.
- Localized in up to 23 languages. Learning paths are supported in up to 23 languages depending on the topic.
Recently introduced Microsoft Learn features include:
- Learn TV: Learn TV streams original live and pre-recorded content daily from Microsoft and the community. Meet our engineers through live training, casual conversations, event coverage and hackathons, all on Learn TV.
- Cloud Skills Challenge: A new way to build your cloud skills with easy, self-paced learning that lets you complete modules in a team environment and compete for prizes.
- Microsoft Q&A: Relevant and timely answers to technical problems from a community of experts and Microsoft engineers. Microsoft Q&A is now the single question-and-answer destination for all Azure products and services.
- Microsoft Learn Catalog API: Integrate Microsoft Learn into your company’s own experiences. Now in preview, the Catalog API enables developers to integrate Learn content and trainings into their existing applications and learning management systems and provides organizational reporting capabilities.
- Microsoft Learn for Students and Educators: We launched a new collection of curated content for students, including learning paths from leading universities and content to inspire and challenge students to build with social impact and responsibility in mind. For educators, we’ve made it easy to access Microsoft ready-to-teach curriculum and teaching materials aligned to industry-recognized Microsoft certifications. These certifications augment a student’s existing degree path and validate the skills needed to be successful across a variety of technical careers.
- Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors: Microsoft Learn is where everyone comes to learn, and the Learn Student Ambassadors are everywhere helping students learn. This new program brings together a global group of campus leaders to help their peers learn things they care about most, from social issues to new technologies. Ambassadors get a first look at new Microsoft technologies, gain leadership skills, and receive mentoring from professionals in the industry, and their peers benefit from their knowledge, which can now be shared via the Microsoft Learn platform.
