Working my way through College quests and now well into dungeon at Mzulft. Have arrived at a point where I need to pick some expert locks and my lockpicking skill is down at around 20. Funnily enough first expert lock I picked as a novice was very easy, but the rest are tough.

Looks like I'll have to get out of the dungeon and come back with more lockpicks and/or a solution to these expert locks.

Any quick way of levelling up in lockpicking ? I'm not going to finish this quest unless I unlock these doors.

LYDIA, PLEASE DON'T TOUCH MY STAFF OF MAGIC, PLEASE DON'T..........AAARGH !!!!!!

Other then finding a trainer not really. There was some talk about a possible bug arou d here a couple of months back. If you hold a torch up to the lock for 30 seconds it might make it easier. I honestly don't know if there is any truth to it.

Just buy/steal/aquire tons of lockpicks and go for it.
When your lockpicks say 99+ in your inventory then there is no need to worry.
You can get potions and charmed items to help out as well but once you have picked a lock or two you shouldn't need them as you know what to look for.
Distinguishing marks on the locks etc will get you close and you just take it from there.
On the odd occaision you will get a lock that is an absolute bastard and lose a [censored]load of picks on it though.

Keep several lockpicks with you and train your own skill on it. Lockpicking depends more on players skill than on characters skill. I have never used trainer or perks for lockpicking and never had problems with it. When your lockpick skill is 20 or more you need about 0-1 picks for apprentice and novice locks, 0-5 for adept ones, 2-7 for expert and 4-10 for master. Or at least that's how I have felt it to be.

Truth be told, there is no difference between 100 Lockpicking and 1 Lockpicking. You'll still be able to Lockpick, and if you don't take the "easier to lockpick" perks, the locks won't get any easier

Best pray to Nocturnal before lockpicking (or to your God, whichever one works)

You will break far few lockpicks with a high skill level unperked on a master lock.

Is it because the sweet spot gets wider or because the picks become harder to break?

EDIT:
Because I don't find my picks getting sturdier from skill level 20 to 54 like now

Um... I don't know Mzulft by heart but there are few quests that require lockpicking to finish and I don't recall any in the College quests. Almost always the locked area is either optional or there is a key somewhere. Try bypassing the locked area and going on with your life, looking around for keys, or levers. Or just save and reload until you get lucky, you can pick any lock with a light hand and a little luck.

My first character was a nightblade, had sticky fingers. No perks in lockpicking. Skill 100. My second character was a Mage, went through stupid amount of lockpicks my first master and expert lock I found. The high skill makes a difference.

Actually not a bug ... but a feature.. doesn't make a whole lot of difference though..
(there is, I believe, an in game book even commenting on this, and no I don't know which one )

fasest and eaisest way to train lock picking is to break the picks

ive noticed eevry time i broke a pick id get xp

im at level 50 lock picking mostly from breaking picks ive unlocked like 25 chest total im not even playing a thief character wish open spells wernt removed :/

I have mine at around 50, i just bought all lockpicks have 99+, i pick every lock i see, it takes like 0-1 for Novice, 1-2 for Apretice, 3-4 for Adept and 5+ for others. your skill goes up as you do the skill. keep at it and it will work. another thiing i do is i save right before doing so if it seems to take long i'll reload and try again. (Third timews the charm)

I don't know about that. My first char had picked Master level locks with zero broken picks (Nocturnal blessed me on first try) and he was a Dual Axe Warrior. My second char, a Thief, had broken quite a number of lockpicks even for Expert locks (no perk in Expert lock)

If there is no data to back the claims, then I call placebo effect

lockpicking is more an understanding of the mechanic than actually level based.

on medium difficulty with a lockpicking skill of 16 I picked a master lock with only three picks. I've also broken 35 picks on lower level locks with a higher skill before I understood the visual cues of the mechanic involved.

it's really all about being patient and remembering that the visual difference between "wont move" and "sweet spot" on the lock gets smaller and smaller as the quality of the lock goes up. You can "try" 6 spots on a novice level lock and find the right one and it's more like 24 spots on a master lock.

I start far left and work my way around the whole lock clockwise in little jumps until I see the lock move, bigger jumps on lower level locks.

Sounds stupid and works really well for me.

Join the Thieves guild and become a full member. Once you have access to the Cistern, you can head into the training room. There are chests of all levels you can train on. They reset every few days. You can get some very nice loot out of these chests, too. And it's not stealing!

This is the way to go about it, from Fallout 3, New Vegas and now Skyrim I am a master at the system.
I tend to start top dead centre (the default starting positon) with my first try though, I find a lot of those locks sneakily just to one side of it.
Then if that fails I do similar to Julienne and work my way around, although I start from centre and go to the right first then go centre to the the left if I get no result on the right hand side.
You learn the increments for each lock rating as you do more and more of them, it as actually a skill you learn in reality and not just the game.

It seems the sweet spot just shrinks as the lock level goes up. I just tap the lockpick to see if there is any movement. If not I'll move the pick in one direction,maybe 10-20 % of the swing. If you're closer you'll get more movement. Just tapping the pick to check for movement will get it to last 3 times before it breaks for me

It doesn't sound stupid, Julienne! That's exactly how it works and how I do it. Now at 100 in Lockpicking and no perks in it, a Novice look always opens when my lockpick is in the "top position" and I usually open it in one try.

I found that I have to turn my lockpick to either the left or the right at a 90 degree angle for Master locks. I also use the different shadings on the lock itself to position my lockpick when I found a "wiggle spot" lol. It definitely is all about patience.

get lots of picks find a master lock and fail over and over and over it will raise your skill

This is what I'm seeing as well. I use the Lockpick pro mod (I don't particularly care for the mini-game, so I don't play it), and have noticed that the size of the sweetspot on various levels of locks (most noticable on master) is still the same, even though my lockpick skill is near 80 as it was when I had just started using the mod, and my skill was in the 20s.

As far as skill level affecting how quickly lock picks break, I don't know, since I never break any. It's possible, I suppose.

The sweet spot gets wider, I suspect by a percent roughly equal (or at least proportional) to your skill. So on master locks there's not a big difference, because 1even 200% of "pretty freaking small" is still "rather annoyingly small".
But yeah, my Argonian mercinary has a 67 lockpicking, and master locks are only a little bit easier than they were out of the gate. Lower grade locks, on the other hand, are now much easier. And no, I have no perks; blowing 5 lockpicks on a master grade lock isn't a big deal, although it seems more and more locks are master grade now- maybe they level?

Anyhow, picking harder locks is a good way to level lockpicking. If you need lockpicks, clearing bandits out of forts tends to net a fair number.

In a way, picking a lock is a lot like the "higher / lower" number guessing game. If you get it to move a little, you know the sweet spot is close, so you try a bit on either side of that, see if it moves more, and if you went to far you try between those two... basically just a numbers game. A sweet spot half as big should only take one extra pick, if you can cut the known "not sweet" zone in half with each pick.

I have had the same experience. I break far fewer lockpicks on average when my skill is in the 50's rather than the 20's.

You're allowed to be skeptical of course, but it would make sense to at least consider it possible, given how every other skill has some sort of raw benefit of having a higher level in it.

Just because you haven't bothered testing the effects thoroughly or done proper research on the matter doesn't mean that there isn't any data to back the claims. The most simplest test is to have your lockpicking be a ridiculous number (Easiest to test with a PC). You'll soon find that the entirety of the lock is the sweet spot. No lie.

PS.
While the exact formula may not be known in full detail, the Lockpicking UESP talk page states the following: Values inside the .esm suggest something like - sweet spot size = base size * (1 + 0.6 * (skill/100)) * (1 + effects).

Difficulty/Base Size: Novice/30, Apprentice/15, Adept/7.5, Expert/3.75, Master/1.875

with lockpicking you need to just pick locks, so pick as many locks as you can, once you're around 50 all the locks get easier but buy lockpicks from general store merchants and just pick as many locks as you can, every time you go to a town pick 4 or 5 locks, every loced container or jewellr case or anything you see pick the lock. also once you're in the theives guild you can pay for lockpick training to help you boost the skill. but you kinda need to just start picking locks from the beginning of the game since its a skill that levels up kinda slow.

I have a couple of tips for ya:

1) holding a torch up to the lock does help a bit. You equip one, press whatever button it is to "swing" it, and you will literally hold it out to the chest. The logic behind this is that the heat actually expands the metal, giving you a bigger sweet spot.

2) when actually in the lockpicking screen, swing the lockpick all the way to one side and slowly, not too slowly though(or it'll take forever), swing the pick to the other side. As you're swinging it to the other side, listen for a "click" sound. When you hear it, stop moving the pick and back it up just a bit (i say back it up a bit because unless you have super human reflexes, you most likely have passed the sweet spot just a bit). Now try to open it. I have noticed that this sometimes doesnt work the first time (it usually doesnt "click" in the correct sweet spot on the first swing) meaning, even if it "clicks" on the first swing from one end to the other, you should do another swing back to the other side. Then, if it "clicks" on the same spot, thats your sweet spot. I find this way to be much more fun and precise than to just try, break, try again. It make me feel like more of a professional lockpicker this way as well. Have fun.