LinkedIn

Lots of people in this audience who work in corporate America especially, we use it constantly.

Every week I'm getting this career development thing in LinkedIn Learning and saying, "Oh, let's learn how to create an AI agent." I personally think it's cool but scary.

Everyone uses AI.

Trump's right, we have to win the AI battle or else we'll become just as irrelevant as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

The AI-powered brand kit creation tools and platforms like Canva and Loca can take information about your business, your values, your aesthetic preferences, and your target audience, and generate a complete set of brand identity elements, logo options, color palette, typography selections, that are internally consistent and appropriate for your described positioning for small businesses and individual creators who cannot afford professional brand design but who understand that visual consistency matters to how they are perceived these ai generated brand kits provide a working foundation that is significantly more coherent than what most people assemble without design guidance Learning design principles through structured AI instruction is the complement to the tool-based learning that Canva and Adobe Express provide.

Platforms like Coursera, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning offer graphic design courses, and the AI tutoring features that have been added to several of these platforms make the instruction more responsive to your specific learning needs than static video courses.

Describing the type of design work you want to do, social media content, presentation design, print materials, brand identity, and your current level of knowledge produces a personalized learning path that addresses the specific principles most relevant to your goals, rather than presenting a comprehensive curriculum regardless of what you need.

the design principles that matter most for social media content are different from those that matter most for print layout and a i curated learning pads account for this specificity the honest thing i want to say is about the specific skill of developing a design i which is not the same as learning to use design tools and which takes longer to develop than tool proficiency the design i the ability to look at a piece of visual communication and perceive what is and is not working with clarity and specificity is developed by looking at a great deal of design with attention and intention not just by producing your own work spending time studying excellent design looking at the work of designers you admire and asking yourself specifically what makes it effective is the practice that builds the evaluative capacity that eventually makes you not just a competent user of design tools, but someone with genuine visual judgment.

And if we can be more socially perceptive, it makes us better communicators, more effective at work, better at leading meetings, and better able to suss out potential miscommunications or challenges before they arise.

So in this video, since it's a trending career skill, I'm actually working on a course for LinkedIn Learning on social perceptiveness.

I want to give you a little sneak peek of how you can up your social perceptiveness right now.

First, positive versus negative cues.

Social perceptiveness is such an important skill to add to your resume right now.

I would love to help you.

You can check out my books, Captivate or Cues, or my latest LinkedIn learning course on social perceptiveness.

This is an essential skill to add to your tool belt.

So my time at LinkedIn was sort of split into two periods.

The first one, I came in as a salesperson, really not knowing a lot about sales, selling sales software to salespeople.

Uh, w- relatively quickly, I got out of our sales team or selling sales software and instead was on the LinkedIn Learning team, and my job was to sell LinkedIn Learning to higher ed across Canada.

And I really loved how I could connect with higher education leaders around the value that they were seeking from LinkedIn well beyond LinkedIn Learning, which was technically what I was selling them.

Lynda.com, which was actually...

I was super lucky to, to be involved when that acquisition happened because Lynda was a really beloved software that had a brand that Teachers, that educators, that librarians were so connected to that I could ride on that into offices where the teaching and learning department would introduce me to the vice president academic, who would introduce me to the president, and so I could sort of work my way up the administration in a trusted manner.

So it wasn't the UFTs and the UBCs and the McGills or the Queens that we were connecting with.

It was the community colleges and the polytechnics that really needed the help, and which had the best employment outcomes for, you know, per dollar in, they were doing by far the best job at getting folks jobs.