Should You Buy Individual Courses or a Subscription?

What’s the best learning service if you’re a software engineer? There are a variety of different purchasing models companies follow, but which one is right for you? You can buy courses individually, or purchase a subscription and access thousands of courses at once. The type of service you want generally depends on what you want to learn and how you want to learn it.

Buying individual video courses might be great if you want to learn a new technology, but having a library of content might help you more if you are early in your career or pivoting to a new technology/field of technologies. For example, if you don’t know java, then using a subscription-based model may help you more than just one course.

Additionally, companies like Lynda.com and pluralsight have learning paths that you can take to bolster and expand your skills. In such a wide field as java, there are a lot of libraries that can be really valuable to learn, such as Spring. Buying a service that covers all of these as opposed to a series of paid courses might cost less overall.

Another consideration is time. If you don’t have a lot of free time, or your amounts of free time is very varied, you may want to consider buying courses and taking them at your own pace. In this way, you’re not paying extra for courses you may not need right away.

One benefit, however, is that subscription services lower the barrier of entry to a given technology. Rather than researching what courses are the best and having to commit and buy a course every time, you can just log in, explore courses, try them out, and choose another one if that doesn’t suit you.

Price is also another consideration. Most people in the software industry are paid very well, so having something that costs $40 a month may not be a very costly preposition. The value that such a service adds to you career and skills may be far greater than the savings you get by purchasing individual courses. Additionally, many technology companies offer a paid service to employees, so check with your employer before purchasing anything.

Sold? Which one should you choose? Check out my article briefly reviewing each service below.