LinkedIn Buddies Up Closer to Lynda.com, Adds Course Recommendations Based on Your Career

LinkedIn is finding more ways to pair its professional network with Lynda.com, the online video library it bought for $1.5 billion last April.

The most recent integration: LinkedIn is using data around which jobs are most popular among its users to suggest collections of videos that can help train someone interested in that career. If you were interested in becoming a Web designer, for example, Lynda.com could now recommend a collection of classes to help you learn the skills necessary for that job.

LinkedIn is calling these “learning paths” and it has created course recommendations for 53 different careers so far, with plans to double that number by year’s end. The company will use data from LinkedIn members to help determine which career pathways to add.

The hope is that these recommendations not only bring more users to Lynda, but that they drive revenue, too. At launch you’ll need a Lynda.com account to get any course recommendations, but LinkedIn is considering other payments options, like buying a course load a la carte, says Michael Korcuska, LinkedIn’s VP of learning products and initiatives.

LinkedIn already sells Lynda.com material to businesses and universities, and Korcuska believes career pathways make the product even more valuable. He used the metaphor that Lynda.com is a grocery store full of ingredients (or videos).

“If you’re a great cook, you can walk in there and buy what you need to make a great meal,” he explained. “Most people aren’t great cooks. They need a recipe, and these learning paths are sort of the recipe and shopping list.”

Some extra revenue would be great news for the company, and would also help justify the $1.5 billion it paid for the video library last year. It’s one of the reasons LinkedIn is also putting Lynda.com courses on Virgin America flights.

LinkedIn stock has fallen by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year, and just this week Barclay’s analyst Paul Vogel downgraded the stock over fear of slowing revenue growth. It’s unclear whether a “shopping list” of videos will actually open any wallets, but it certainly can’t hurt.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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