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Self-Directed Learning Solutions for Businesses: Bookboon vs LinkedIn Learning vs Blinkist
As the pace of change in the business world continues to accelerate, companies must constantly adapt to stay competitive. This means ensuring that employees have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in a rapidly changing landscape. One solution to this challenge is self-directed learning, which allows people to take charge of their own development and acquire new skills on their own terms.
7 minutes
Written by Johan van den Bos
In this article, we will review and compare three of the most popular self-directed learning solutions for businesses: Bookboon, LinkedIn Learning, and Blinkist. Specifically, in this article we aim to provide a fair and objective evaluation of the solutions including:
What is self-directed learning
Before we move on to the comparison, let’s quickly review what self-directed learning is and why it has become so important for businesses today.
Self-directed learning is the process of taking responsibility for one's own learning and development, where learners actively seek out information, resources, and experiences to acquire new knowledge and skills.
This type of learning is important for companies because it promotes:
- continuous learning
- engagement and retention
- improved performance
- cost-effectiveness
By empowering employees to take control of their own development, companies can reduce the costs associated with traditional training programs and provide a learning culture that promotes continuous growth and development.
LinkedIn Learning: Almost unlimited content
LinkedIn Learning is an online learning platform that provides a vast library of courses taught by industry experts in various fields. The platform is designed to help users develop and enhance their skills and advance their careers. It is a popular solution for self-directed learning for individuals as well as for companies looking to provide training and development opportunities for their employees.
The main advantage of LinkedIn Learning is its extremely large selection of courses. The platform provides over 18,000 courses that cover a wide range of topics, including:
- Business
- Technology
- Creative
- Personal development
The courses are designed and taught by industry experts, and the content is regularly updated to keep up with the latest trends and developments.
A second key advantage of LinkedIn Learning is its integration with LinkedIn's professional network. This feature enables employees to add completed courses and certifications directly to their LinkedIn profiles, making it easier for them to showcase their skills and knowledge to colleagues, and employers.
However, the greatest disadvantage of LinkedIn Learning is its high pricing. While some courses are available for free, others require a paid subscription, which can be very expensive for many companies.
Secondly, while LinkedIn Learning offers a wide selection of courses, the quality of its courses vary, and not all courses are equally engaging or informative. Some users also find the user interface of LinkedIn Learning to be complex and difficult to navigate.
Finally, depending on the needs of your company, the level of customer and end-user support offered by LinkedIn Learning can be a disadvantage. While LinkedIn Learning does offer customer support, users have reported long response times and difficulty getting their issues resolved. Some companies may require more personalized support or help customizing their learning plans to fit specific learning objectives. For these companies, LinkedIn Learning's support may not be sufficient, and additional resources may be needed to meet these needs.
Let’s now explore some LinkedIn Learning alternatives.
Bookboon Learning: Great user experience and support
Bookboon Learning is a digital learning solution that aims to provide the industry’s best user experience for employees. Because of its ongoing efforts to make learning as easy and engaging as entertainment streaming services, Bookboon has become a popular solution for self-directed learning. According to Bookboon reviews online the solution delivers one of the highest employee utilization rates in the industry.
The main advantage of Bookboon Learning is its simple, engaging, and personalized user experience that increases staff engagement in self-directed learning. Because of this, Bookboon has made a name for itself as the “the Netflix of digital learning”.
Looking at Bookboon reviews, a second key advantage of Bookboon Learning appears to be its reputation for outstanding customer service. Every customer is dedicated a Customer Success Team that is charged with the task of ensuring they get the highest possible user satisfaction levels and results from the solution.
Finally, Bookboon Learning is one of the most innovative players in the field. Beyond only offering eBooks, Bookboon also offers what is perhaps the industry’s best functioning audio learning module and is one of the only providers right now to offer users daily, live interactive virtual classrooms with industry experts.
However, the main disadvantage of Bookboon Learning is its limited content numbers and selection of topic areas. Bookboon only offers 3000 bite sized eBooks and 2000 audio learning titles. The company focuses primarily on human skills, soft skills, and mental health content to support employee personal development; however, several Bookboon reviews have pointed out that its content catalogue is limited when it comes to business related topics such as marketing, finance, and sales.
Several Bookboon reviews have pointed out that another disadvantage of Bookboon Learning can be the length of its content. It’s eBooks typically take 1-2 hours to complete, which can be difficult to accommodate for those who are on a time crunch and need knowledge on a topic right now. However, by focusing on the higher end of the bite sized learning spectrum, Bookboon offers employees a more in-depth learning experience than that provided by many other digital learning providers.
Bookboon Reviews
When looking at Bookboon reviews online, the company generally receives positive reviews. Here are a few extracts:
“Bookboon Learning offers a large variety of eBooks and audio learning with an optimal user experience. It has been great partnering with Bookboon to support our employee learning journey”
“The quality of content is excellent with a wide variety of industry experts and languages. The length is ideal. Not too long. Not too short.”
Blinkist: Bite-Size learning taken to the extreme
Blinkist is a digital learning platform that offers busy professionals a quick and efficient way to consume knowledge from over 4500 best-selling books, in the form of bite-sized summaries.
The key advantage of Blinkist is its convenience. With time being a precious commodity, Blinkist allows users to absorb key insights from a book in just 15 minutes, enabling them to learn on the go and maximize their productivity. Moreover, with access to a vast library of titles spanning a wide range of topic areas, Blinkist for business use can help busy professionals stay up to date with industry trends and expand their knowledge base despite having very limited time during the day for learning.
The main disadvantage of using Blinkist for business learning though is the loss in depth of knowledge when relying entirely on bite-sized book summaries. Can people really learn new skills or understand the complexity of a sophisticated topic after reading just a few pages? The condensed nature of Blinkist summaries can result in a less comprehensive understanding of the content, when looking at Blinkist reviews, this seems to be a concern for professionals seeking in-depth knowledge in particular areas. Furthermore, Blinkist's summaries may not offer the same level of engagement as reading a full book or course, which could impact retention and application of knowledge.
If you want to read a range of Blinkist reviews from end users, try looking at Trustpilot. As of March 2023 Blinkist reviews were an average of 3 out of 5 stars.
So, for business investment, is Blinkist worth it? As with all three options, we advise you take a good look at the relevance of the offering to your needs. Our specific guidelines later in the article will help you answer the question is Blinkist worth it for your company.
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Answers to the Top 5 FAQ about these self directed learning solutions
1. Which solution offers the most comprehensive selection of learning resources?
Of the three solutions, this would definitely be LinkedIn Learning.
- LinkedIn Learning offers more than 18000 pieces of content
- Blinkist offers 4500 summaries of best-selling books
- Bookboon Learning currently offers 3000 eBooks, 2000 audio learning titles, and daily live virtual classrooms
2. Which solution offers the best user experience and employee utilization rates?
This would probably be Bookboon Learning, given that Bookboon has gone to great efforts to design and integrate user experience into the core functioning of its solution. Looking at Bookboon reviews online, the company seems to have made a name for itself in the industry as “the Netflix of digital learning”.
3. Which solution offers the best bite size learning opportunities for busy professionals?
For really busy professionals, Blinkist offers the best bite size learning solution.
- Blinkist provides bite size summaries that let users digest the key insights of a book in less than 15 minutes.
- Although Bookboon Learning also offers short audio learning content, many of their eBooks take 1-2 hours to complete.
- Whereas the length of learning resources available on LinkedIn Learning varies from short content to very long content.
4. Which solution offers the best customer support?
Although this depends on the level of support your company needs, Bookboon Learning is probably the best choice for customer support. Bookboon dedicates a Customer Success Team to each of its clients tasked with making the solution a success.
While LinkedIn Learning does offer customer support, LinkedIn Learning is not the company’s main product and users on review sites including Trustpilot have reported long response times.
5. How do the three solutions compare in terms of the quality of their content?
Each of the three solutions offer an adequate level of quality. However, because Blinkist provides summaries of best-selling business books, the quality of its summaries depends on the quality of the individual books it summarizes. With LinkedIn Learning, because of the sheer size of its content catalogue, the quality of content can very considerably.
Finally, Bookboon Learning recruits its own authors and subject matter experts and produces all its content in-house, giving it full control over the quality of its content.
Unique benefits of Bookboon Learning:
- User experience
- Customer support
- Focus on soft skills
Unique benefits of LinkedIn Learning:
- Wide selection of content
- Integration with LinkedIn professional network
Unique benefits of Blinkist:
- Convenient bite-sized summaries for learning on-the-go
Choosing the best self directed learning solution for your company
Even if you have a good understanding of the pros and cons of each of the solutions you are considering, it can still be difficult to identify which solution is the best match for your company. Here the rule of thumb is always to prioritize the learning needs of your company and your employees when making this decision. Although LinkedIn Learning may be the name that first comes to mind for a self directed learning solution for businesses, it is certainly worth investing a little time to compare LinkedIn Learning alternatives.
The checklist below will help you cross off the most important criteria when determining which solutions to move forward with in your decision process. Ultimately, you should rank these criteria from most important to least important for your company to arrive at the solution that has the highest potential of matching your company’s requirements.
- Do they offer the right subject areas for my company?
- Do they offer enough content to satisfy my company’s learning needs?
- Do they offer enough learning formats to tailor to different user preferences?
- Is the solution user-friendly enough for my staff?
- Is the solution within our budget range?
- Is the solution available only on desktop or on additional devices as well?
- Will the solution be easy to integrate with my company’s LMS or learning environment?
Conclusion
In this article, we examined and compared three of the industry’s most popular self-directed learning solutions: LinkedIn Learning, Bookboon Learning, and Blinkist. Each solution offers unique features and benefits for employees seeking to take control of their own learning and personal development. In the end, your choice of self-directed learning solution should depend on your company’s budget and the specific needs and goals of your organization and its employees.
