Learn how to use social media to promote your business. Discover how to create Facebook and Twitter profiles that engage customers and build great buzz for your brand. In this LinkedIn Learning course, marketing expert Megan Adams shows how to craft, execute, measure, and optimize a winning social media marketing strategy. Learn how Facebook differs from Twitter, and how to adjust your strategy to succeed on both platforms. Megan then shows how to build out your profiles and write engaging, high-quality content that interests your target audience. She explains the unique features of each platform, such as hashtags and rich media, and discusses how to maximize your reach by attracting more followers and fans. Finally, Megan shows you how to measure the results of your efforts to see how well your posts and tweets are performing, and provides some simple guidelines for engaging with followers online.

Proving ROI is one of the toughest challenges facing marketers. Stakeholders want quantitative and qualitative data that prove campaigns are working. This course aims to help users of social media prove its value, beyond vanity metrics such as likes or comments. You can learn the skills you need to measure and drive ROI from organic social media, without needing to spend a penny on advertising. Expert Michael Taylor covers the measurements that really matter—from conversation amplification to the word-of-mouth coefficient—and shows how to define and track them using tools such as Google Analytics. He then explains how to turn insight into action and drive continuous improvement for a business. Learn high-performing tactics for major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn, and reverse-engineer emerging channels like TikTok. The skills you learn in this course will help you maximize your investment in social media.

Social media illuminates the people and experiences that connect you and your ideal customers. Business leaders who might have once seemed out of reach are now only a few clicks away. In this course, sales professional and prospecting coach Miles Croft shows how to leverage this power to connect with new prospects, explaining how to build a social selling strategy that helps you increase connections and sales opportunities. Miles steps through how to analyze your product to determine who your ideal customers are, and then review your own network, LinkedIn, and other platforms and websites to find prospects. He explains how to analyze your targets and zero in on commonalities between you and your potential customers. Plus, Miles covers options for approaching your targets, including how to build rapport using your connections.

How is a software architect different from a developer? What exactly do architects usually do, and what additional skills would you need to become one? Instructor Lee Atchison answers these questions and more as he introduces you to thinking like an architect. Whereas a developer focuses on details, an architect’s role requires letting go of the details in order to guide the process. A good architect evaluates proposed designs and methodologies and provides feedback to keep the big picture and all outside needs in mind. Lee walks you through a day in the life of the architect, which lets you see the roles that architects may fill for themselves and others. The modern architect needs to keep several principles in mind, and Lee discusses each one. He covers additional skills you need to develop to become a successful software architect, then concludes by walking you through how to discuss with your current manager your goal of becoming an architect.

While spontaneity may be fun and valued in many instances in life, there are certainly areas where you don’t want to leave things up to chance or make an uninformed decision—buying a house, interviewing for a job, running a marathon. These are all things that require preparation, and doing them on the fly could produce disastrous results. As Mike Fine explains in this course, the same can be said for software testing. Join Mike as he teaches the many ways that your preparation for a test ends up impacting your overall results. He reviews the various phases of testing and the different ways to prepare for alpha, beta, and delta testing. Even if you’re an experienced quality tester, Mike shows the importance of reviewing the mundane details that you might do every day and rarely think about, where one small, missed item—an expired software license, for example—might cause your whole test to collapse.

We may marvel at a musician or athlete for their high level of skill and execution, but equally as important as their mastery of skills is their incredible technique in applying those skills. Technique is something you develop to ensure that whatever you deliver is the best possible outcome of your work, and in this course, Mike Fine applies this idea to software testing. As Mike shows, the more refined and honed your skills are, the better the results of your testing. Whether you’re a software tester looking to add to your skills, or prepping for an ISTQB certification, mastering many different test techniques only increases the chances that you have the tools to accomplish any task. Mike covers key techniques like black-box testing, white-box testing, and experienced-based testing. As these techniques are often full of esoteric lingo and complicated terminology, Mike also gives some advice on how to communicate your testing process so your results aren’t lost in technical jargon.

Agile is quickly overtaking waterfall as the methodology for developing products. This brings interesting and important challenges as well as a mind shift in executing Alpha tests. Testing has more complexities that you might imagine. There are a variety of approaches, procedures, and strategies for conducting testing throughout a product test. This course with Mike Fine focuses on illuminating the variable and proven techniques used to achieve quality assurance on products, and the issues and challenges you may encounter when switching from the traditional Waterfall methodology of product development to the agile processes. Mike covers the basic concepts of what makes quality testing, goes over existing processes, how to transition to agile testing, key techniques and tools, and analyzes best practices for communication, product delivery, and timing, testing, and alignment.

If you’re a SOLIDWORKS user looking to take your skills to the next level, join David Antanavige as he shows how to create advanced engineering drawings that can be used in product documentation and manufacturing specifications. David goes way beyond basic views of parts and components and details how to create broken-out section views, alternate position views, and bills of materials. He also shows how to add geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) symbols for manufacturing specifications, and finishes the course by showing how to create 2D layouts.

Discover ways to maximize the power of SOLIDWORKS by optimizing the interface to suit any workflow. Learn about how to personalize the command ribbon and toolbars to display frequently used features, as well as how to customize mouse gestures to make mouse movements more effective. Plus, explore default keyboard shortcuts that expedite common operations, and see how to customize shortcuts for even more efficiency.

Expand your SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD skills by learning how to design a machine with moving parts. In this course, learn through designing the components of an early-19th-century rival to the steam engine. Follow along with Johno Ellison as he leads you through the steps for creating a Stirling engine, a closed-cycle heat engine invented by Robert Stirling in 1816. Johno shows how to use SOLIDWORKS to create all the parts, combine the parts into an assembly, and prepare drawings for the final product. Johno also provides tips and ideas for moving the creation from a virtual to physical design.

Consumer electronics are all around us, and new products are created every year. In this course, instructor Johno Ellison teaches the basics of designing these items in SOLIDWORKS. Through this project-based course, he shows you how to design a game controller using SOLIDWORKS features like lofts, fillets, mirroring, and shell. Course projects include creating an assembly, adding fastening details, and even creating the buttons, joystick, and printed circuit board that go into the controller. Johno concludes with a discussion of development and potential next stages in the design process.

Do you need to design and build gears for work, study, or a hobby? In this course, instructor Ryan Krawchuk covers the basics of mechanical gears, gives a hands-on lesson on modeling a spur gear using SOLIDWORKS, and then describes how to create a simple assembly. Ryan begins with a description of spur gears, helical gears, and others gears, as well as their respective applications. He covers key gear design attributes and nomenclature. Ryan steps you through spur gear equations, for both metric and English measurement systems, then goes through each step in modeling a spur gear. Once your gear model is complete, he shows you how to design the mounting plate that gears sit on, how to insert gears and mounting plates into your assembly, and how to use concentric and coincident gear mates. He discusses how to use a series of gear mates to allow gears to rotate dynamically to one another, then concludes by showing you how to animate your assembly with a SOLIDWORKS motion study.

The ability to present yourself and communicate well is crucial in any work environment. In this course, adapted from the podcast How to Be Awesome at Your Job, learn how to build on your presentation skills to gain a competitive advantage in your career. Professional speaker Diane DiResta shares tips and tricks for leveling up your presentations and boosting your executive presence. Learn how to craft your presentations around what’s important to the audience to ensure that you're only sharing the most impactful information. Discover how to shift your focus away from yourself to conquer your fear of speaking. Plus, get strategies for ensuring that your body, tone, and words are giving off one consistent message; planning for your worst-case scenario and establishing recovery strategies; handling tough questions; and more.

This course was created by Pete Mockaitis of How to Be Awesome at Your Job. We are pleased to offer this training in our library.

The internet brings a world of information to your fingertips, but not all information is equal. Whether you're seeking news, product reviews, health data, or any other kind of information, it's important to use trustworthy sources. In this short course, Andrew Seaman, former Ethics Chair for the Society of Professional Journalists, shows how to quickly determine the accuracy and reliability of information you find online. Andrew explains how information sharing has changed, in both positive and negative ways, with the advent of the internet. He offers helpful tips for becoming a savvier media consumer of various kinds of online information: news, product reviews, health content, and more. To conclude, Andrew shares free online tools you can use to create healthy information habits.

In this course, instructor Kathy Flint shows how Spring Integration fits into the overall Spring framework. Kathy covers realistic use cases that warrant the use of Spring Integration, such as APIs, reactive websites, and database-integrated systems. Kathy demonstrates the full capabilities of Spring Integration by building a demonstration application; she starts with an empty Spring Boot application and adds Spring Integration components in increasing complexity, ending with a substantive demonstration application. She covers key features like message channels, message transformation, routing, and aggregation. Kathy finishes the course by identifying practical challenges and choices that an architect or engineer may encounter during the design and implementation of a Spring Integration system.

Want to test—and develop—your SQL data-engineering skills? Do you fancy yourself pretty skilled at SQL and want to see just how sharp you are? Then check out this installment of the Code Challenges series, as instructor Harshit Tyagi presents a number of challenges requiring you to write SQL queries to solve problems and answer questions. The challenges start at a relatively low level of difficulty—column selection, filtering rows from data, sorting and grouping query results—and get progressively tougher, testing you on topics like handling missing and invalid data, calculating moving window average, and data transformations. The challenges are all a few minutes long, and use a single database, so you can jump around from challenge to challenge or watch the entire course. So, if you want to see if you’re equal to the tasks, try out these SQL challenges.

Squarespace websites offer a variety of content types that you can leverage to make your sites more interactive and engaging. In this course, explore the different types of pages and content that you can add and tailor for your website. Learn how to set up a blog on your Squarespace website, including how to customize the design and include media files. Find out how to post new blog content featuring images. See how to create a new website that can display your upcoming events, complete with a sign-up page so visitors can receive newsletters and notifications. Put these new site-building skills together as you follow along with the final example project where you get to see a microsite built for a restaurant.

The Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) certification is an excellent entry point to a career in IT security. To help you prepare for the SSCP exam, instructor Mike Chapple has designed a series of courses covering each domain. In this installment, Mike covers the objectives of the first domain, Security Operations and Administration, which comprises 16% of the questions on the exam. Topics include the security triad, data security, security controls, and compliance training. Learn about core concepts and the security code of ethics, and find out how to document controls, start asset and change management programs, conduct security awareness and training, implement physical controls, and assess the compliance of your organization.

The (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) certification is an excellent entry point to a career in IT security. To help you prepare for the SSCP exam, instructor Mike Chapple has designed a series of courses covering each domain. In this installment, Mike covers the objectives of Access Controls, the second domain, which comprises 15% of the questions on the exam. Topics include identification, authorization, and authentication, including multifactor and mobile device authentication. Learn about the identity management lifecycle, and find out how to implement authentication mechanisms and access controls.

To join one of Mike's free study groups for access to bonus tips and practice questions, visit certmike.com.

Jump start your career in IT by earning the (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) certification. In this installment of the SSCP Cert Prep series, instructor Mike Chapple covers the objectives of Risk Identification, Monitoring, and Analysis, the third domain of the SSCP exam. Topics include quantitative risk assessment, risk visibility and reporting, vulnerability assessment tools, and security assessment techniques. In addition, learn about security information and event management (SIEM) systems, visualization and reporting, software testing, and more.