It's March Madness season — do you have your brackets filled out yet? It's been documented over and over that productivity in the corporate world suffers in March, as professional’s attention goes to the renowned NCAA Basketball Tournament. But it doesn't have to be that way — you can commit to learning new skills so that you can be more productive.
Often, though, the largest challenge is figuring out where to start: how do you choose what to learn?
We’ve got you covered! The 2019 Skills Bracket Challenge is a fun gamified way to look at the most important and relevant skills in the world today, making it easy to help you prioritize the two most important skills you can work on — one soft skill and one hard skill — so that you can be more productive and more successful at your job.
How to play the 2019 Skills Bracket Challenge
Taking on a goal to learn 64 courses isn't feasible, but finding and committing to working on two of them in March is a SMART goal. Begin by looking at each matchup in the brackets and choosing a winner.
For example, for soft skills, would you prefer Critical Thinking or Personal Effectiveness Tips? Do this for each matchup to determine the winner, which will quickly reduce the list to 32. Repeat this until you've reached your final four and then finally — the one soft skill and one hard skill you’ll commit to learn in March! It's fun and easy!
Download a PDF version of the 2019 LinkedIn Learning Skills Bracket Challenge here to get started! The PDF contains interactive links to each of the courses on LinkedIn Learning.
Share it with a friend! Print out the brackets and proudly display them at your office or in your cubicle—studies show that publicly committing to a goal helps ensure that you achieve it.
If you're an L&D professional or lead a learning program at your company or organization, use this to help inspire others to commit to learning goals too! Managers, you can use this to help your employees identify the skills they want to work on to improve their own development.
Bracketology: How the courses were chosen
To create the Skills Bracket Challenge, I began by taking the most-watched courses on #LinkedInLearning over the past three months, and organized them into soft and hard skill categories.
Leveraging insights from our Skills Companies Need Most in 2019 research, I ranked the best performing courses, placing them into brackets. The end result is a list of 64 of the most popular and in-demand courses that you can choose from.
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Shout out to Rebecca Roberts, VP of Learning and Development at CFCU Community Credit Union for inspiring me to put this together. Rebecca shared that she used a similar theme to help promote better learning engagement at her organization.
Topics: Productivity tips
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