Learn and Volunteer With Your Extra Time at Home

You may be spending far more time at home than you’re used these days but that doesn’t mean it’s time to be bored! Linux Professional Institute (LPI) offers various ways to educate yourself and volunteer your time to assist in exam development and learning materials creation.

The last few weeks have brought about a lot of change in our lives. Conferences are being cancelled, postponed or moved online, most of us started to work from home and social activities are being reduced to a minimum. At the same time, internet providers are seeing around a 70% burst in internet traffic, a lot of it going not just to video conferencing services, but also so video streaming platforms and online games.

In addition to binge watching and gaming, your free evenings are a great opportunity for continuous learning and professional development. LPI’s learning portal offers brand new learning materials for our Linux Essentials and LPIC-1 101 exams. We also offer a comprehensive catalogue of learning materials created by our publishing partners and other publishers.

If you’re just getting started with Linux, you will need to install it first. You could easily do so by setting up a virtual machine on your own computer, or by using a Linux installation in the cloud. Getting access to such a Linux instance is quite easy, since a lot of cloud providers offer free trial accounts. Some of the big vendors which offer free trials include Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. Other vendors like Digital Ocean or Hetzner provide access to Linux virtual machines at very low prices. All of these offers are a perfect playground to take your first steps into Linux.

If you’re interested in advanced topics, check out our blog series on the DevOps Tools Engineer. You’ll learn a lot about modern software development, automated system configuration and containers. If you’re more interested in BSD, use LPI’s BSD Specialist Exam Objectives along with the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD documentation to get started.

Finally, LPI offers various volunteering opportunities which are perfectly suited for any free time at home. If you’re interested in writing exam questions for any of our exams, including the Security Essentials and Web Development Essentials which are in their early stages of development, reach out to me (Fabian). If you’d like to write or translate a lesson for our learning materials, let Markus know. We’re thankful for every helping hand.

For additional volunteer opportunities, you can also check out our community programs. 

No matter what you do while staying at home, please follow the advice of the authorities. Even if the impact of your individual change in behaviour seems neglectable, exactly that little change is crucial to keep our health systems intact and eventually protect the weakest ones in our society. Stay safe and healthy, and take care of each other.