Wednesday 6 May 2015

Pluralsight - Service Review


Pluralsight
The World's largest teach and creative training library! 

This has been one of the greatest tools for my career development. I happen to be very lucky in that for a number of years now I have had full access to this site provided for by work. First through TrainSignal before it merged with Pluralsight. But over the last few months I have discovered that there is much more than just technical skills to be gained from this site, there is a wide range or personal and professional development courses.  These non-technical courses go way beyond just technical chops.

My first introduction to this learning method was the old CBT Nuggets. But having used Pluralsight now for 4 years I believe it is by far the best player in this market. At work I had 4 title changes in under 4 years and I attribute a lot of that advancement to being able to train at my own pace and stay on top of new technologies by using courses on this site.

Over the last few years I have done courses on Server 2012, SQL 2012, vmWare, ITIL, Storage, System Center and more. Now occasionally you will find authors or instructors who just do not do it for you. But of the 58 courses I have completed since the TrainSignal-Puralsight merger there have been very few that I did not enjoy. But it was much the same at university, you will find some course instructors you love and work through most or all of their courses because the teaching style is so engaging.

An example of how good some of these courses are, a few years back one of my first tasks after moving to the Senior team was to build our VDI Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using vmware view. I watch the course through from beginning to end. Watched it a second time and made notes for the step by step install and configuration process. Within a few days I had our environment up and running, and it is now time to upgrade to Horizon View.

As mentioned earlier, lately I have been focused on more non-technical courses. Jason Alba has some amazing career development courses. There are a number of excellent management or leadership courses available and new courses coming online often. And currently there are almost 60 career development and management courses available.

And one of the greatest new features is native apps for iOS, Android and Windows phone, and with the native apps the option for offline content to work while travelling or to save data usage on your devices.

I attribute much of my success over the last 5 years to using this tool and for the price point you just cannot beat the breadth and depth of courses available to help you grow personally and professionally. This would be an excellent resource for any developer, programmer or IT Infrastructure professional to have access to. You can also start with a 10 day free trail so why not give it a try and check out a course or two?




Reviews of Pluralsight Courses and older Trainsignal Courses now on Pluralsight.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great Article Steven! Thanks for sharing.

JibberJobber Guy said...

Steven, thank you so much for the endorsement of my courses (and the other leadership/management courses) on Pluralsight! A friend forwarded me this post and I was surprised to see my name in it. I really appreciate the mention and the support. If you have any requests for specific soft-skills courses, let me know :)