Training Discovery

Have you been thinking about renovating your kitchen? Design the kitchen of your dreams with SketchUp. This course teaches you how to design a new kitchen that fits your existing space using "the easiest, most fun, entirely free 3D drawing tool in the world." Scott Onstott shows how to model and demolish your current kitchen to make room for the new design, and start adding new cabinets, counters, appliances, fixtures, and lighting, as well as modern, must-have features such as a standalone island. Along the way, you'll learn how to work with SketchUp's layers, groups, components, styles, scenes, and ready-made models from the 3D Warehouse. All you need to get started is to download a free copy of SketchUp.

Create highly realistic 3D architectural drawings with V-Ray, a popular third-party renderer for SketchUp. This course shows how to take a single scene with interior/exterior elements and add lights, move cameras, and enhance objects with translucent and reflective surfaces. Author Brian Bradley explains concepts like irradiance mapping, perspective correction, and fixed rate sampling, while showing how to leverage each of the V-Ray tools and its material and lighting types to achieve specific effects.

V-Ray 3 for SketchUp features interactive rendering technology that allows users to see results immediately upon changes to the model. In this course, Brian Bradley both introduces and helps to solidly ground you in your ability to use the tools and features found in the powerful V-Ray for SketchUp rendering solution. After he familiarizes you with the V-Ray interface, Brian demonstrates how to add illumination to your scenes using the program's versatile lighting tools. He shows how to work with different light types for adding both artificial light and natural-looking daylight. In addition, he covers the V-Ray camera, materials, map types, render elements, FX tools, and more.

There is no predictable career ladder in today's workplace. Most people no longer have the security of staying in one field, one job, or even one location. Navigating your career now means being able to adapt and stay relevant. This course is designed for anyone who wants to take charge and plan the next move—whether it's choosing a career, negotiating a promotion, or changing fields. Learn to leverage your unique skills and passions to create a flexible career path that stays true to your values and allows you to adapt as needed. Career expert Christine DiDonato helps you understand the new rules of work, foster a career vision, create a career map, and get started on your next play.

Effective talent management drives benefits for an organization. In this course, leadership, team, and organizational development consultant Katy Sharon reveals how aligning talent management with your company's strategic plan directly impacts business success. She reveals how to build a top-notch talent management strategy, use that strategy to create a talent management plan, and bring it all together using best practices. Along the way, she explains how to identify talent needs, assess existing talent, recruit the right people, and develop employees to meet talent needs. Plus, Katy provides you with a high-level look at succession planning.

Lynda.com is a PMI Registered Education Provider. This course qualifies for professional development units (PDUs). To view the activity and PDU details for this course, click here.

The PMI Registered Education Provider logo is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Explore tools, tips, and techniques for leading real-time virtual training. No matter what teaching tool you use, from Adobe Connect to Blackboard to Google Hangouts, you can apply these lessons to your own digital classroom to increase collaboration and connection with students. Corbin and Kat Anderson cover the elements of creating virtual synchronous training, including selecting the right tools, implementing instructional strategies, and managing learner interactions and engagement. Find out how to apply the flipped classroom model to online teaching and get tips for engaging learners and assessing learning. These lessons are a great resource for anyone who conducts real-time training on the web, including instructional designers and presenters.

Video offers a unique method for teaching and learning—especially for technical skills like programming. Not all students are coders, but giving your classes exposure to these subjects via video will enhance their learning, retention, and future career opportunities. In this course, Renaldo Lawrence introduces a variety of tools to deliver lessons via video and help increase higher-order thinking. Renaldo shows how to understand each student's learning style and then use support material, adapt existing online content, and record your own videos to teach technical skills. Learn how to record and edit videos with TubeChop, Adobe Spark, and other video applications, and share lessons with other educators. Plus, find out how to cultivate technical skills in students that are more music, art, or literary inclined.

Blended learning is all about the students: combining instruction with digital resources to help increase student achievement and engagement. In this course, Chris Mattia explores the various aspects of blended learning, and provides guidelines to create a blended classroom that meets students' diverse learning needs. The techniques rely on technologies such as Google Apps, Android and iOS devices, video, learning management systems (LMSs), and open-source tools such as WordPress to promote sharing and collaboration. Watch and learn how to use blended learning to create dynamic, engaging, and student-focused lessons.

Practicing test-driven development in the Spring framework—or any framework, for that matter—can help you speed up your software release cycles, and ensure that you end up with a high-quality product. Learn the tricks for using Spring and JUnit— an open-source testing tool—together, and how to use this power combo across your entire backend stack to achieve optimal test coverage. In this course, discover how (and why) to use Spring and JUnit for test-driven development. Instructor Shonna Smith also shows how to lay the groundwork for testing some typical components in your backend application: @Service, @Controller, and @Repository components. Throughout the course, Shonna provides hands-on examples of how to apply these concepts in a real-world application.

In SQL Server 2008 Essential Training, Simon Allardice explores all the major features of SQL Server 2008 R2, beginning with core concepts: installing, planning, and building a first database. Explore how Transact-SQL is used to retrieve, update, and insert information, and gain insight into how to effectively administer databases. The course also covers features outside SQL Server's database engine, including technologies that have grown up around it: SQL Server Reporting Services and Integration Services. Exercise files are included with the course.

Whatever a database is being used for—websites, bookkeeping, sales and inventory, or even the lowly to-do list—it's still all about the data. Completely updated for 2014, SQL Essential Training is designed to help users understand the most common language for database wrangling, SQL. Beginning with a quick start introduction for those who want to start working with data immediately, instructor Bill Weinman teaches all the major features of SQL: creating tables; defining relationships; manipulating strings, numbers, and dates; using triggers to automate actions; and working with subselects and views. He offers a solid working knowledge of the language, and shows how to retrieve and manage data efficiently. The final chapter includes a real-world example of building a simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) application using SQL.

Learn everything you need to know to start building databases with SQL Server. Martin Guidry reviews the major features of SQL Server 2014 and shows developers how to architect efficient, high-performance solutions for organizations of any scale. Watch and learn how to install and configure SQL Server, create databases and tables, automate common tasks like backups, and use the SQL query language to retrieve and manipulate data.

SQL Server comes with many features for monitoring, securing, optimizing, and supporting your database infrastructure. Learn how to use these features to administer your SQL Server instances, and prepare for the Microsoft MCSA Administering a SQL Database Infrastructure (70-764) certification exam.

Adam Wilbert covers four main skill areas required of SQL Server 2016 administrators: configuring access to data, managing backups, monitoring performance, and implementing the high-availability features of the product. Learn about data encryption, access control, role-level security, and dynamic data masking. Use SQL Server auditing to gain insights into the health and performance of your system, and determine upgrade paths. Discover how to back up SQL Server and perform full or partial restores, and monitor activity. Explore indexing and query execution plan management. Plus, learn to configure availability groups to mitigate hardware failure.

SOLIDWORKS users who contend with hang-ups and slow load times can miss deadlines and lose productivity. In this course, discover how to improve SOLIDWORKS performance and tune your workstation for optimal performance. Instructor David Antanavige teaches a variety of methods for tuning workstation and SOLIDWORKS performance, beginning with basic system updates, and moving on to tweaks and adjustments to SOLIDWORKS itself. Explore how various SOLIDWORKS options affect performance, and learn tips and tricks for avoiding performance problems in the first place. Plus, discover how to squeeze more performance out of SOLIDWORKS using tuning options.

The SOLIDWORKS Premium package contains more complex piping and routing features, which enable designers to integrate piping and tubing early on, ensuring operability and serviceability and avoiding extra costs. This course teaches how to use the SOLIDWORKS Premium routing tools for piping and tubing applications. Start by learning exactly what routing is and how it is used. Instructor Erin Winick then explores making routes, sketching pipes, auto-routing, and editing piping. She adds coverings and features such as weld gaps and valves, and creates pipe drawings. She also covers designing with flexible tubing, which is measured, assembled, and routed differently than pipes. After completion of this course, users should understand all basic functionality of piping and routing in SOLIDWORKS, including the related parts libraries.

Do you have a business problem that you are having trouble solving? Mike Figliuolo has a simple five-step process for solving problems and leading your business through everyday uncertainty and larger change initiatives. Learn to pin the problem down and define it, generate possible solutions, determine the best solution, and create a clear recommendation to solve your particular challenge. This is the same process Mike has taught multibillion-dollar companies to solve their business problems. Learn how to use it to solve your own.

Cities are in the perpetual process of "becoming"—and evolving ever faster as industry and technology advance. Architects like Kevin Sloan ensure community still has a place at the heart of our urban spaces and places. We follow Kevin as he visits three of his favorite projects in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas: Vitruvian Park, a landscape-driven green space; Dallas Urban Reserve, an abandoned, rubbish-strewn lot remade into a contemporary subdivision; and Airfield Falls, a water district property redesigned to showcase the area's aviation history and water-wise landscaping practices. Watch and learn how inventive design solutions like these will help define the future of modern cities.

SmugMug is a popular photo-sharing site that also enables photographers to create online portfolios with customizable, drag-and-drop design templates and provides the option for selling prints. In this course, photographer and educator Justin Reznick shares tips for getting the most out of SmugMug. Justin shows how to choose the right SmugMug plan for your needs, set up and design a site, and customize the look and feel of your portfolio. Plus, he covers how to set up services on your site, sell prints, and look under the hood on a live site.

Social media is having a dramatic impact on the professional photography and video industry. This course shows how to use social media to its full potential and leverage the unique benefits it offers photographers and filmmakers. Rich Harrington presents strategies for being more effective on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, and more. From scheduling to posting and connecting, learn the building blocks to increase your social media reputation.

Small businesses can't afford not to be active on social media. Having a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account keeps you tuned into your customer base and helps drive traffic to your website or brick-and-mortar store. Learn what it takes to be successful at social media marketing, without a lot of resources or dedicated marketing staff. Digital and social media strategist Martin Waxman explains the key terms and definitions (everything from SEO to hashtags) and tells you how to start finding your customers online. Learn how to make an action plan that outlines your goals, team, and budget, and find time to implement your ideas. He'll also talk about what content to publish where and the tools you need to measure the success of your efforts.

Proving social media return on investment (ROI) is one of the toughest challenges facing marketers. This course helps you transcend vanity metrics, such as number of likes, to demonstrate precisely how social media creates value for your organization. Instructor Luan Wise covers the measurements that really matter, how to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram analytics to define and track measurements, and how to use this information to produce actionable insights and drive continuous improvement for your business.

This training course will teach you the essential tools and modeling techniques to design efficiently in SOLIDWORKS—the world's leading CAD software for product design and development. We use the simple but effective "why, what, how" method of teaching, with the end goal of creating manufacturing-ready parts and assemblies.

Author Gabriel Corbett first shows how to create 2D sketches and use the Extrude and Revolve tools to turn those sketches into 3D parts. Then he shows how to create more complex geometry with sweeps, lofts, and cuts. Then we jump into lessons covering modifier tools such as Fillet, Chamfer, Draft, and Shell. Then you learn how to create uniform standard holes with the Hole Wizard, and use the pattern and mirror features to reuse geometry. Next we combine parts into assemblies and create a moving assembly from parts and subassemblies. Finally, we create accurately annotated drawings, ready to hand off to a manufacturer.

SOLIDWORKS 2018 is 3D CAD software that delivers powerful design functionality with an intuitive user interface to speed your design process and make you instantly productive—enabling you to deliver innovative products to market faster. In this course, Gabriel Corbett teaches you the essential tools and techniques necessary to create parts, assemblies, and drawings efficiently in SOLIDWORKS.

First, see how to how to use the sketch tools to create two-dimensional sketches that become the foundation for 3D objects. Next, look at extruding and revolving 3D features; creating complex objects using the Sweep, Loft, and Surface tools; and modifying parts. Learn how to create uniform holes with the Hole Wizard, and explore more advanced modeling techniques using equations, mirroring, and pattern tools. Then review best practices for putting parts together in assemblies and building robust structures. The course wraps up tips for creating detailed drawings that relate the final parts and assemblies to a manufacturer, complete with an itemized bill of materials and drawing notes.

Want to start your own business? Bootstrap it! LinkedIn Influencer Sramana Mitra, an expert on entrepreneurship, shares her insights on how to start a new business without any external financing. Bootstrapping can be a way to quickly validate and launch a company, and get the traction you need to attract serious investors (or you can bootstrap all the way). Sramana dismisses some of the myths that get in the way of new entrepreneurs, and then turns the focus on to the benefits of bootstrapping. She walks through two methods of bootstrapping that can be particularly valuable: selling services and developing a business while holding down a full-time job.

What do Tata Group, Walmart, Samsung, and Porsche have in common? These companies are all examples of a successful family business. With the right idea and a good business plan, you too can start your own family-run business. In this course, entrepreneur Bob McGannon shares his insight and advice on starting a business with family and friends (drawing from experience with his own 14+ year business). He begins with the importance of having an exit strategy and clear roles, governance, and ownership before you start the business. He also covers critical topics such as setting up business finances and managing working relationships, and provides troubleshooting tips and advice for keeping everything running smoothly.