In my earlier blog post I have shared my experience of how I could make surprisingly good use of Pluralsight's FREE April subscription, in the hope that others might draw similar mileage in times of Covid-19 pandemic uncertainty.
Now in this blog post, I'd like to continue on that and share my experience of Pluralsight platform. I had earlier used this platform sitting alongside my team members to encourage online learning in teams that I coached and consulted with. Unfortunately, I didn't explore it much back then to motivate my teams. I hope the earlier post and this one serves them well as much as I hope it serves you :)
What really clicked for me?
- I really love the Skill IQ tests. It is not too lengthy and not too short. Most of the questions are good with custom time ticking. Check out my Pluralsight Profile for the number of tests that I took during April 2020.
- The conferences addition is a good one. I book-marked a few but couldn't complete it all.
- The user profile page is motivating to learn more and more. I happened to discover it mid way through the month prompting me to take more tests. It surely gamefied my experience.
- I personally like the way learning path is crafted, although I didn't go that way during this FREE month offering.
Some of the courses I would recommend at Pluralsight
- Schema Modeling Patterns and Best Practices for Document Databases by Nuri Halperin
- MongoDB Change Streams: Driving Real Time Events and Streaming Applications by Nuri Halperin
- Big Data & Reporting with MongoDB by Nuri Halperin
- Implementing Analytics and Real Time Data in AWS by Andru Estes
- Migrating Databases with AWS Database Migration Service by Michael Brown
- Storybook: Getting Started by Nate Taylor now dated but still worth watching!!..
Some Authors I follow at Pluralsight
- Nuri Halperin for topics on MongoDB. Nuri is Senior Architect and Founder of Plus N Consulting.
- Andru Estes for topics on AWS Cloud.
- Michael Brown for Topics on AWS Cloud.
What I would wish from Pluralsight?
- It has come a long way from being more of a Microsoft shop. It still is in my opinion. Make it much more diverse in tech.
- Make it a go to place for courses related to certifications like that of AWS, Kafka, etc. This one is super competitive today, but is well worth pursuing.
- While most questions in Skill Iq were good, there were some that lacked clarity given the dynamic time to answer that question. I tried giving my feedback on quite a few questions but got no acknowledgement or response from Pluralsight. I don't know if they have a team that is going to look into it. Wish it is a little responsive to feedback to build that affinity.
- Okay I see Pluralsight has its own branding in the way courses are organised and structured. But I think it will be more fun to have other brands on boarded too like how O'Reilly did with Safari Online.
- It will be super awesome to have ebooks too on this platform.
- It will be great to have sandboxes like KataKoda for interactive learning.
- Onboard popular authors from other platforms to have their courses in Pluralsight as well. Some of the popular authors include Stephane Maarek (for AWS), Maximilian Schwarzmuller (for ReactJS), Mumshad Mannambeth (for Kubernetes) etc.
- Have Learning Paths tailored to Certifications and Technology. During one of my consulting stints, I was trying assemble a list of courses to help my teams go through it for Azure cloud and Kubernetes.
- Make it more individual friendly when it comes to pricing.