Business networking giant LinkedIn will be buying online tutorials and training platform Lynda.com for $1.5 billion, reports VentureBeat. The acquisition is expected to close by Q2 this year and is a combination of ~52% cash and ~48% stock. Most of Lynda’s team members are expected to join LinkedIn with the latter’s belief that that Lynda.com will help both its users and professionals to accelerate their careers. Job seekers, meet skills providers The LinkedIn blog post announcement goes on to offer use cases for the integration: Lynda’s library of premium video content across professional topics and languages, job seekers on LinkedIn would be able to sign up for/be prompted to get accredited on needed skills at jobs through Lynda, looking on a search on SlideShare on a particular topic and then be prompted to look up a course on the same topic on Lynda. Seems like I have been underestimating online education sector all these years. LinkedIn buys http://t.co/ekxNrcHwbW for $1.5bn. — അരുണ് (@arun_asb) April 10, 2015 "LinkedIn pays $1.5B for online educator http://t.co/OkCWeoktxe in its biggest acquisition yet" http://t.co/BlSKz5sbT7 #social #feedly — Gabriella Nelms (@GabriellaNelms) April 10, 2015 "Ugg... I hope this is not bye bye Lynda" LinkedIn To Buy Online Education Site http://t.co/1nW56kfS8Z - TechCrunch http://t.co/BwVlMsY37m — Steve McCoy (@counterpointer) April 10, 2015 Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, said in his blog post that “Through its singular focus on programming and content quality, we concluded that lynda.com had developed the best approach for LinkedIn in the industry…. Both companies…
