LinkedIn Learning is a powerful online learning platform that allows organizations to provide training and development opportunities to their employees. With a vast library of courses across a wide range of topics, it can be a valuable tool for upskilling and retaining talent.
However, managing user access and enrollment on LinkedIn Learning can become cumbersome as an organization’s usage grows. Assigning courses, tracking progress, and ensuring licenses are properly utilized can become an administrative burden. This is where automating user management through LinkedIn Learning’s APIs and admin tools can help.
In this article, we’ll explore methods for automating common user management tasks like assigning courses, enforcing learning paths, managing groups, and more. With the right approach, you can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focused on strategic learning and development priorities.
Key Benefits of Automating User Management
Automating user management provides several important benefits:
- Saves time by reducing repetitive manual processes
- Increases efficiency by enforcing rules and access controls programmatically
- Allows you to scale your usage as your organization grows
- Consistent application of learning assignments, permissions, and groups
- Provides visibility into learning behaviors, progress, and analytics
For organizations with hundreds or thousands of learners, it’s virtually impossible to manage things like course assignments effectively through manual processes alone. Automation makes it feasible.
Some common use cases where automating user management can help:
- Automatically assigning courses to new hires based on their role
- Grouping users dynamically based on attributes like department, location, or manager
- Restricting access to certain courses based on user attributes and permissions
- Enforcing learning paths to guide users through multi-course curriculums
- Deprovisioning inactive users to free up unused licenses
While LinkedIn Learning provides a web interface for manually managing users, courses, and groups, automating these processes can save huge amounts of time and effort.
Methods for Automating User Management
There are two main methods for automating user management in LinkedIn Learning:
1. LinkedIn Learning Admin APIs
LinkedIn Learning provides REST APIs that allow you to programmatically manage LMS functions like:
- User management – Create, update, deactivate users
- Course assignment – Enroll users in courses
- Group management – Create, update, manage groups
- Reporting – Pull learner progress and analytics
By connecting these APIs to your HRIS, LMS, or other enterprise systems, you can build automated processes to manage users and assignments based on your business rules and processes.
For example, you could automatically:
- Create new user accounts on LinkedIn Learning when employees join the company
- Assign courses to users based on their profile data such as department, location, or role
- Generate reports on learning progress and consumption to report back to your LMS
The APIs provide the building blocks to customize and integrate LinkedIn Learning with your tech stack to meet your specific use cases.
2. LinkedIn Learning Admin Tools
In addition to the Admin APIs, LinkedIn Learning provides built-in tools within the admin interface to help automate aspects of user management including:
- Dynamic Groups – Automatically group users based on criteria like domain, department, manager etc.
- Learning Paths – Create sequences of required courses for users to progress through
- Auto-assignments – Set rules to automatically assign courses based on user attributes
While not as customizable as the APIs, these tools provide user-friendly options for applying rules that help automate user and course management directly within LinkedIn Learning.
Some examples of how you could use these tools:
- Create a dynamic group for all sales employees based on department
- Build a learning path for new managers assigning courses to take within their first 90 days
- Auto-assign new hires to complete your harassment and diversity training courses
So while the Admin APIs provide full customization for developers, the Admin tools are configurable options accessible to any LinkedIn Learning admin.
Steps to Implement Automated User Management
If you’ve decided to pursue automating user management for LinkedIn Learning, here are some best practices:
1. Audit Your Processes and Requirements
Take time to document your current manual processes for managing users, courses, groups, and assignments in LinkedIn Learning. Identify pain points and opportunities for automation. Define your use cases and requirements.
2. Evaluate Your Options
Based on your audit, determine whether the Admin APIs, Admin Tools, or a combination would be the best fit. Factor in the level of customization needed and your internal resources.
3. Design Your Solution
Map out how automating specific processes would work. Define what systems need to integrate. Design the workflows, business rules, and triggers that will govern the automation.
4. Start Small
Pick a contained high-value use case like automating new hire assignments to pilot first. Configure the rules and workflows for this specific process. Test it thoroughly.
5. Iterate and Expand
With a proven pilot in place, tackle additional use cases incrementally. Continue configuring rules and integrating systems to cover more scenarios. Monitor effectiveness and optimize over time.
6. Document Your Approach
Maintain clear documentation on the automated processes, business rules, and configurations to inform governance and future maintenance.
7. Provide Oversight
Have a governance plan to periodically review automated assignments, deprovisioned users, group membership, and learning analytics for quality control.
Example Use Cases
To make things more concrete, here are two examples of automating common user management scenarios with LinkedIn Learning:
Automated New Hire Onboarding
* Create a new hire dynamic group rule based on:
– Domain = company.com
– Hire date = Last 30 days
* Build a “New Hire Learning Path” containing:
– Compliance courses like harassment training
– New Hire Orientation course
– Manager Welcome Video
– Product Training 101 course
* Configure auto-assignment rule:
– Criteria: If user added to “New Hire Group”
– Action: Assign “New Hire Learning Path”
– Timing: Immediately on adding to group
Now any new employee with a company.com email will get automatically onboarded with required training when their account is created. Progress can be tracked within the learning path.
Department Specific Learning Paths
* Create dynamic groups for each department:
– Group name: Department – Marketing
– Criteria: Department field = “Marketing”
– Group name: Department – Sales
– Criteria: Department field = “Sales”
– Group name: Department – Engineering
– Criteria: Department field = “Engineering”
* Build learning paths for each department:
– Marketing Learning Path: SEM, Social Media Strategy, Content Marketing
– Sales Learning Path: Sales Methodology, Sales Tools, Account Management
– Engineering Learning Path: Coding 101, Software Systems, Technical Workshops
* Auto-assignment rules
– If added to “Department – Marketing” assign “Marketing Learning Path”
– If added to “Department – Sales” assign “Sales Learning Path”
– If added to “Department – Engineering” assign “Engineering Learning Path”
This automatically provides every new employee with targeted development content based on their department and role.
Challenges and Considerations
While automation can simplify user management for LinkedIn Learning, there are some challenges and limitations to be aware of:
- Requires technical resources to build and maintain integrations
- Can be complex to map all business rules and requirements
- Changes to systems like HRIS requires updates to automation
- Need oversight to audit automated actions and catch errors
- Custom builds may break with LinkedIn Learning updates
- May still need manual intervention for exceptions or edge cases
The key is starting with well-defined requirements and high-value use cases first. Rigorously test each incremental step before expanding automation further. Maintain clear documentation and have a governance plan. Automation should make things smoother but still allows for human oversight when needed.
Conclusion
Automating user, course, and group management processes with LinkedIn Learning has huge potential to save time and increase efficiency for larger organizations. Options like the Admin APIs and built-in Admin Tools provide the capabilities to build custom integrations or apply rules and workflows within the platform. Starting in a focused, incremental way and establishing governance are keys to automation success. The reward is self-service learning administration and valuable insights into development.