LinkedIn’s latest report dropped a number that should make every business owner pay attention: 49% of learning professionals see a full-blown skills crisis happening right now. Not coming, not potentially brewing. Happening.
The immediate response from the market? A flood of e-learning platforms promising lifetime access to thousands of courses for pocket change. EDU Unlimited by StackSkills is the latest offering, bundling over 1,000 courses for less than twenty bucks. It covers everything from blockchain to growth hacking, AI to marketing fundamentals. On paper, it sounds like the perfect solution to a very real problem.
But here’s what nobody wants to talk about: access to courses doesn’t equal actual learning, and actual learning doesn’t always equal applicable skills. We’ve all been there. You buy the bundle, bookmark a few interesting titles, maybe even start one or two. Then life happens, priorities shift, and that lifetime access becomes a lifetime of guilt sitting in your bookmarks folder.
The Problem Isn’t Course Availability
Walk into any business meeting these days and someone will inevitably bring up upskilling. It’s become the corporate equivalent of eating your vegetables. Everyone agrees it’s important, everyone nods along, but implementation is where things fall apart.
The real issue isn’t finding courses. The internet is drowning in educational content. YouTube alone could probably upskill your entire team if they actually watched with intention instead of letting videos play in the background while checking emails. The issue is creating an environment where learning actually sticks and gets applied.
StackSkills boasts 350+ expert instructors and courses spanning beginner to advanced levels. That’s great. Truly. But quantity doesn’t solve the fundamental problem most entrepreneurs face: their teams don’t have the time, energy, or immediate incentive to sit through hours of video content about skills they might need someday.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Professional development works when it’s targeted, timely, and tied to real outcomes. Someone learning Python because they saw it on a “hot skills” list will drop out halfway through. Someone learning Python because they need to automate a repetitive task that’s eating three hours of their day? That person finishes the course and immediately applies what they learned.
The platform includes progress tracking and quarterly instructor Q&A webinars, which are genuinely useful features if you’re actually using the service. The 4.6/5 Trustpilot rating suggests some people are finding value. But ratings on learning platforms often come from the motivated 10% who would probably succeed learning from a library book anyway.
The technology angle is interesting though. Courses on AI, blockchain, and emerging tech can provide real value if you’re in an industry being disrupted by these forces. Understanding the fundamentals of how these systems work gives you enough knowledge to ask better questions and make smarter decisions, even if you’re not the one building them.
The Flexibility Trap
Online learning’s biggest selling point is also its biggest weakness. “Learn on your own schedule” sounds perfect until you realize that without external structure, most people’s schedule never includes learning time. It’s always the thing that gets pushed to next week when the current week gets hectic.
For entrepreneurs juggling multiple responsibilities, the idea of fitting in course modules between meetings sounds reasonable. The reality involves half-watching videos at 1.5x speed while mentally running through your to-do list, retaining maybe 20% of the content.
This isn’t a knock on StackSkills specifically. It’s the fundamental challenge of self-directed online learning. The people who succeed with these platforms are the same people who would succeed with any learning method because they’ve already developed the discipline and motivation required.
Where the Value Actually Lives
If you’re going to invest in something like this, the real value comes from using it as a curated resource for specific problems. Need to understand the basics of digital marketing for a new product launch? Great, there’s probably a focused course for that. Team member needs to get up to speed on a particular software tool? Find the relevant course and make it part of their onboarding.
Treating it like Netflix for professional skills, browsing for interesting topics when you’re bored, that’s where the value proposition falls apart. The courses covering finance, graphic design, and business fundamentals are only useful if they’re filling a specific, immediate knowledge gap.
The discount from $600 to $19.97 is aggressive enough to make you wonder about the actual value proposition. Either the original price was wildly inflated, or the business model relies on volume sales to people who won’t actually use the product extensively. Probably both.
The Skills Crisis Needs More Than Courses
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the skills gap isn’t going to be solved by unlimited course access. It requires companies to build learning into their culture, give people actual time to develop new skills, and create clear pathways showing how those skills translate to career growth and better compensation.
Buying your team access to 1,000 courses and calling it professional development is like buying gym memberships for everyone and wondering why workplace health hasn’t improved. The tool isn’t the solution. The tool is just the tool.
If you’re an entrepreneur genuinely committed to upskilling yourself or your team, platforms like this can be part of the answer, but they can’t be the whole answer. You need accountability structures, dedicated learning time, and most importantly, a clear connection between the skills being learned and the problems you’re trying to solve.
The question isn’t whether $20 is worth the access to hundreds of hours of content. The question is whether you’ll actually create the conditions that allow you or your team to extract value from that access, because the course library isn’t what’s scarce anymore.
