I created my LinkedIn profile over a year ago, but paid little attention to it until this summer. A bit of googling led me to make several minor changes to my page, but the biggest change in my renewed interest in LinkedIn was that I began expanding my network. Of course, there was still plenty of work to be done.
First I looked at the profile checklist to see how well I had done building my profile. I was surprised at how poorly I had done considering LinkedIn told me I was an “All-Star” before this #loweclass professional identity extravaganza. My photo checked out, but my headline did not. After correcting my mistake I scrolled through the entire checklist, worried I may be working on this all night. The rest of the checklist required minor tweaks, but did not have any massive issues (or so I thought). I checked out Jacquelyn Smith’s article on what to say in my LinkedIn summary statement because I figured mine needed an update. What I actually needed was not an update, but a complete overhaul. Smith encouraged a level of personalization that I had never thought about. She also suggested summaries that were four or five times the length of mine. Fixing this part of my profile was by far the most difficult venture of this whole project. Probably the biggest issue with my use of LinkedIn’s professional network was that not only had I not taken advantage of the tools I could use to find jobs and employers, I had no idea how to use them. I bookmarked the article Using LinkedIn to Find a Job or Internship with a quickness. That microsite and the MSOE article about the 14 mistakes I’m making on LinkedIn helped me realize that I was missing out on a great function, message personalization. I loved the LinkedIn app on my phone, the app where you cannot personalize connection invitations. This will not be a problem in the future. Two other mistakes the most recently mentioned article taught me were minor but important. First, I did not realize I could break my website down into sections. I also had no idea that LinkedIn had a special list of skills that the search engine recognizes (and that employers search for). These are details that will be important to me as I continue to update my page and develop my network. Now my hope is that the connections I had before this massive profile overhaul will give me another chance.
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AboutOn this page you can find blog posts about my adventures in journalism, ponderings about projects, experiences with storytelling tools and updates on what I'm working on. Archives
February 2017
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