Free online training for Guild Freelancers – sign up now at Lynda.com
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Perhaps more than other journalists, freelancers require and benefit from a wide and ever-expanding range of skills. A freelancer’s schedule might encompass producing materials for a nonprofit organization, launching a blog and reporting a deep-dive story with graphic and video components.
One of the many benefits of membership in the Guild Freelancers, a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, is access to training.
Whether you’d like to learn Final Cut Pro or Podcasting, InDesign or conversational Japanese, you are eligible to take these and many more courses through Lynda.com, an online company offering thousands of video courses in software, Web design, photography, business skills and many more subjects.
Our parent union, the Communications Workers of America, pays for its members to upgrade their skills on Lynda.com.
Lynda.com is a bit complicated to navigate. But the wide variety of courses presented by experts more than makes up for the difficulty.
Access to Lynda.com happens in two-week cycles. Register first, and when your training dates come up, a CWA staff person will send you an email containing your access code. After you’ve completed your course, you can repeat this process as many times as you like, planning two weeks in advance. Lynda.com’s offerings are deep as well as broad. Under photography, for instance, you’ll find 574 courses and 26,308 video tutorials.
The model contracts we developed in 2018 are still our best advice on the core issues that freelancer agreements should cover (click here). However, since AB5 and its revisions passed, protecting our rights has become more complicated.