LinkedIn… the new Facebook?

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

By Katie Ryan, history student

LinkedIn is an online platform that allows people to create personal accounts to record their career and experiences. You can log achievements such as your educational qualifications, your work experience, and your certificates.

Because of the profile set up, LinkedIn acts as a networking platform, so you can forge connections with people you know and other people in industries you may wish to explore. Additionally, people post informative and persuasive posts about issues surrounding employment, and the site has its own job board.

How is this beneficial?

Having a LinkedIn profile is beneficial for three main reasons: opportunities, networking, and presenting yourself.

1. Opportunities

The LinkedIn site is designed for ambitious professionals and, therefore, is a cornucopia of career opportunities.

The Jobs section of the website is used by companies worldwide to advertise their employment opportunities from entry-level to senior roles, internships to insight days. This means the website offers unlimited chances to increase your experience and build your CV.

Additionally, you can create personalised posts to inform other users that you are seeking work, enabling you to present yourself to more employers.

Some interesting opportunities I have seen on the site recently, which show how varied the opportunities are the following:

 As you can see, the site also offers further information, such as how many applicants and how popular the job advert is, which makes the application process far more transparent and less daunting!

2. Networking

You can use your LinkedIn account to connect with others. The best place to start is by connecting with your peers and family and seeing how it goes from there.

This means that you can look at people’s different experiences and education to find things in common. You can then use the messaging function to forge these connections to allow you to meet people in similar fields to yourself. Networking and making these connections is vital as it allows you to share advice and insights with each other and therefore prosper in the job market.

Another way that the account format is beneficial is that you can look at other people’s accounts for inspiration. This means that you can look at those far more senior and see how they approached their career, particularly in the early stages. For instance, you could search through the University of Nottingham alumni and see how graduates of your subject progressed after leaving the university.

3. Presenting yourself

Creating a LinkedIn account also enables you to ‘brand’ yourself and present all of your achievements – essentially, it is a very thorough CV. Because it clearly sets out different sections, you can describe how each experience makes you an attractive candidate, what skills you developed, and what you learnt.

You can also create posts that are then shown to your connections to mark and celebrate your achievements. For instance, people will post if they get a promotion, start a new activity, or new job. This allows you to share your success and demonstrate your extracurricular attainments. In particular, it is beneficial because sometimes it is difficult to describe on a CV that you spend a lot of your time going to academic lecture series or attending webinars.

Having a professional and comprehensive LinkedIn is a major benefit in the modern age, as some job applications allow you to attach your LinkedIn account so that they can consider it when you apply.

This takes some responsibility away from your CV and onto your LinkedIn account instead.

Moving forward

I therefore recommend that all young professionals have a LinkedIn profile.

Setting one up is rather easy - simply create an account and fill in the profile with as much detail as you wish to share. You can also change your privacy settings to protect your personal information!

My advice to those just starting to use LinkedIn: follow the university and some of its society pages first. It’s a great starting point.

Find out more about setting up a LinkedIn profile and talk to our staff about how to make the most of this platform. Also check out our events programme for upcoming LinkedIn events.