by guest blog­ger Sandy Hov­at­ter
You can visit Sandy’s blog at www.ApprehendingGrace.com

Near the bot­tom of the list of ven­dors, nes­tled in the “Soft­ware and Web Devel­op­ment” cat­e­gory, you’ll find a jewel when it comes to cost effec­tive, high qual­ity com­puter train­ing. In today’s job mar­ket, most peo­ple need up-to-date com­puter train­ing, either to be more mar­ketable to a new employer or to become more valu­able to your cur­rent one. Lynda.com is the best, most con­ve­nient, and least expen­sive way I know of to upgrade your com­puter skills.

Whether you want to learn how to get the most out of sophis­ti­cated, com­mer­cial soft­ware like Adobe® InDe­sign® or learn how to use Twit­ter or Face­book, you’ll find what you need at Lynda.com, at a great price. More about price later. First, about the training.

Courses, Courses, Courses
So far, I’ve taken courses in InDe­sign (9 hours), and Word­Press (5 hours). I took both courses after I had been using both prod­ucts for a cou­ple of years. And I learned a great deal! On my list for future train­ing are:

• Quick­Books (6 hours)
• Microsoft Access (5 hours)
• Acro­bat Pro (9 hours)
• Sev­eral Pho­to­shop courses (Lynda.com offers 21 dif­fer­ent Pho­to­shop CS3 courses rang­ing in length from 1.25 hours to 20.75 hours!)
• I might even take the Face­book course (3 hours).

It’s not like I have tons of time on my hands for train­ing, but Lynda.com makes train­ing easy. Each course is bro­ken into short video seg­ments – usu­ally 3–8 min­utes long. You can eas­ily watch a seg­ment or two dur­ing lunch, while wait­ing for a phone call, or sim­ply when you need a short break. The qual­ity is very high, the con­tent is very good and the breadth of offer­ing is phenomenal.

The Lynda.com train­ing library includes more than 730 courses that are avail­able 24/7. You can eas­ily search through the courses by sub­ject, soft­ware, ven­dor, or author.

Did I Men­tion the Great Price?
Every one of their 730 courses offers free video tuto­ri­als so that you can get an idea of the course. The free mod­ules might be as much as half an hour of train­ing. That’s plenty to leave you want­ing more. So when you’re ready to learn more, you can sub­scribe for the low price of $25/month or $250/year. Pre­mium mem­ber­ships, which include exer­cise files so you can prac­tice along with the instruc­tor, are $37.50/month or $375/year. Per­son­ally, I sub­scribe on a monthly basis when our work­load is light or when we have an imme­di­ate need for train­ing. Over the course of a year, I might pur­chase four to six one-month memberships.

I’ve taken pro­fes­sion sem­i­nars on sev­eral dif­fer­ent soft­ware pack­ages. A great price is $149 for a one day course. $1,499 for three days is not uncom­mon. That would be any­where from six months to six years worth of Lynda.com train­ing. And with Lynda.com, you have train­ing in more than 730 courses, not just one.

A final thought: A sub­scrip­tion to Lynda.com is a great gift for just about every­one who uses a computer.

Don’t for­get to jump to Lynda.com from your favorite charity’s shop­ping page on www.ShopOnline4Charity.org.