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One of my goals for the year is to always be learning. Some of the baby steps I am working through to make up that goal are to listen to more podcasts, read books and take some online classes on topics that are interesting to me.

As a working mom, it is really difficult to take a class anywhere other than online. Unless I want to give up a Saturday morning with my family (and I don’t) pretty much all in-person classes, like at a local community college or an art class at a studio, are out of the question.

Lucky for me, there are quite a few companies that are dedicated to creating great online courses that can help grow and improve pretty much any skill. If you want to get better at money management, there is a class for that. If you want to learn calligraphy, there is a class for that. If you want to learn how to do those pivot tables the accounting department in your office keeps talking about, there is a class for that too! (And I highly suggest you take it to learn about the pivot tables).

 

Sharing a few of my favorite online class services and the classes I am taking!

 

Websites that Help You to Keep Learning New Things

LYNDA.COM

Lynda is a great site to improve any of the skills that you might use at work. It is especially great if you work in the marketing or a creative services field. There are classes about business management, marketing, and even coding if you want to learn how to do that. I have taken a couple of classes about SEO on there, which is really helpful for my day job in HR. Knowing how to write better job descriptions so they bumped up in search results is definitely a good thing to know!

Lynda is $25.00 a month, but check with your local library. There are a lot of libraries who partner with Lynda and you can get a free membership to Lynda if you use your library card.

 

MASTERCLASS

I really LOVE MasterClass. There is an extremely vast course library, and they also bring in extremely well-known experts to teach classes as well. Want to Usher to teach you about the Art of Performace? Yup. Could Gordan Ramsay teach you a thing or two about cooking? You betcha he could.

MasterClass is really fun since it allows you to learn skills that you might have wanted to do growing up, but didn’t really get to explore. If you take the classes individually, they are $90. And the classes aren’t just something you watch in an hour, so you really get your money’s worth. There are workbooks and questions that may even get answered by the celebrity teacher themselves.

If you pay for an annual subscription it is $180, so look around on the site and see if there are 3+ classes that you would really want to take and then decide.

I am really interested in Steve Martin’s (YES HIM) comedy class. And thanks to MasterClass, you get to learn from the best!

 

CREATIVELIVE

CreativeLive is a great way to learn a little bit more about a skill that you want to turn into a side hustle. There are classes for design, typography, knitting (cool right?) and photography. As a mom, I love a good photography class, because I want to have really great photos of my kids.

One of the unique things about CreativeLive, is that they stream their most popular classes live 24 hours a day. FOR FREE. So you can check on the site at any time to see what class is playing.

If you want to buy a class to watch at your leisure, prices vary based on the class and instructor, but there are always sales going on. So browse the course catalog, subscribe to their newsletter and keep your eyes peeled for the flash sales!

 

BRIT & CO

If you want to be adorable, the courses at Brit & Co will help you to do just that. They have a bunch of introductory classes, like embroidery and chalk illustration that are super helpful in learning how to DIY that thing you saw on Pinterest.

There are also free classes that cycle through like this one about how to feed your toddlers a nutritious diet!

 

SKILLSHARE

SkillShare is another great site that I like to use for classes. They have a lot of free classes that can teach you enough on the topic to be dangerous, but you won’t be an expert. If want to dive deeper, you can sign up for a premium account (get 2 months of Premium SkillShare for free here!) and take some of the more in-depth classes.

SkillShare probably has the largest class list of any of the sites I have recommended, so you are sure to find some classes that intrigue you!

 

 

These are some great tools that I am using to complete my goal of learning new things this year. Have you tried any of these sites, or think that any of these sound like a good fit for you?

Let me know in the comments below!