Are you a student ready to kickstart your professional journey, or a working professional looking to expand your network with like-minded individuals. If so, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to connect, grow, and elevate your career!
LinkedIn is a popular social networking site that enables its users to build their network amongst people they want to connect professionally. It has now become the most preferred platform when it comes to networking and leveling up your career prospects. Users utilize it to keep track of their achievements professionally. LinkedIn is not only limited to individuals looking to track their progress and achievement but is also relevant to salespeople, recruiters and organizations, where they use LinkedIn as a resource to recruit professionals into their organization. Unlike other popular social platforms, LinkedIn has distinguished itself from other popular social platforms and established itself as a leading social networking platform.
When first registering on LinkedIn as a first time user, you see individuals boosting their achievements, people getting into new job positions, individuals congratulating and uplifting one another. This definitely first feels unfamiliar and gets overwhelming majority of the time. Therefore, here’s how you can get started with LinkedIn and optimize it so you can excel both academically and professionally.
Get Started With the Right Profile
When it comes to first impressions, it is the profile that does this job on LinkedIn. Setting up a profile with necessary details is very important. These are the details we must be mindful about:
- Profile picture – Upload a nicely groomed, professional looking profile picture of yourself on LinkedIn.
- Specify your title – The title you give yourself must be specific and relevant to the field you are professionally involved in. For an example if you are a student.
- University/College Affiliation – Including which college or university you are currently enrolled in helps to broaden your network as you can link with students and alumni from your institution and broaden your mutual network.
Include a Summary
LinkedIn has allocated a space ‘Add Summary’ where you can write a description summarizing your skill sets, strengths along with highlighting your achievements and career aspirations in short. This helps your profile visitors to get a gist of you as an individual and what sort of things you are involved in.
Update Experience
Prior work experiences can be shortlisted along with extraordinary achievements you made during that time period. For example, if the company you worked at had a certain percentage increase in their sales while you were in charge, then you can specify the percentage increased further elaborating on achievement.
Build Connection
After setting up your profile, building connections is the next important step. You can expand your network with mutual and individuals and organizations who are relevant to your professional background by building a connection.
Actively Use LinkedIn
Last but not the least, the key to optimizing LinkedIn is by being an active user. Updating on your achievements, celebrating work anniversaries, updating on a new job position are few ways to remain active. Even if there aren’t recent achievements to update on, activeness can still be maintained by interacting with different posts in the feed itself. Interacting with the posts, congratulating and celebrating people in your network are ways you can be active even when you have no new updates from your side.
It takes both time and effort to set up a LinkedIn account and being an active user on the platform. Therefore, one must be aware of how to properly optimize LinkedIn to its full potential. While LinkedIn is definitely a professional social networking site, users must not use it in a burdensome way. As users, we must not be obligated towards accepting all kinds of invitations and connections, those of which are relevant and important can be the ones we accept. While seeing everyone actively boosting their achievements, we might feel pressured or rather find ourselves comparing. This should be particularly avoided in order to minimize the pressure and burnout. Healthy comparisons might be alright but unnecessary comparison will only lead to added stress. LinkedIn is a social networking platform for individuals who want to excel professionally hence, we must first be proud of our achievements no matter how small and maintain a supportive and encouraging environment overall.