Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. Today we are going to discuss about learning LinkedIn for students. We are going to talk about creating a LinkedIn profile, building your network, using LinkedIn day-to-day, job search and company research, managing your LinkedIn account, and a conclusion.

Create a LinkedIn Profile

We all know how important LinkedIn is, it is a traditional resume with more in-depth detail. Where many individuals can see what you do and what you accomplished. Therefore, it is important to always update your profile and to make it the best it could be. Here are some tips or suggestions that will help you create an amazing profile.

The first thing to do is to upload a picture of yourself. This will allow other individuals, and even Google to identify and know who you are faster (Schinkten, 2018). Adding a background picture is also very useful to include. Next step is to personalize your headline, create one that describes what is your education and what you are passionate about (Schinkten, 2018). After inserting a headline, the creation of a summary will help people to know you a bit better, here you can go in more detail (Schinkten, 2018).

Another important tip is to include a section about your education, here you can talk about your university and high school education (Schinkten, 2018). Also, you can publish a section on LinkedIn that talks about all your skill and endorsements (Schinkten, 2018). By doing this, you will be helping organizations to know if you have the same requirements they are looking for, which will lead to a future job. As you can see when you always update your LinkedIn profile, you will be helping yourself and opening yourself to new opportunities at the same time.

Build Your Network

Networking is a great way to get to know new people, it also helps you to find new and exciting job opportunities. When networking with professional on LinkedIn it will with many benefits. Such as insights and advice, future collaborations, resources and job opportunities (Schinkten, 2018).

Now you know the benefits of networking and what it brings to the table. After this knowledge you should practice networking, you can apply this by searching for individuals on LinkedIn. You can message them and discuss what you have in common and even see if they can help you get a job you desire. A useful way to network is to use the alumni tool on LinkedIn. This is a tool in which you can search for the university you went to in the past, and afterwards network with past students and get to communicate with them (Schinkten, 2018). For me personally, when I finish my marketing degree at NAIT I will use this tool to communicate with other alumni. I will want to get to know how they got their current jobs and what they did to succeed.

Using LinkedIn Day-to-Day

As we know that updating your LinkedIn profile is great, but also using LinkedIn is even better. Firstly, use and explore your feed, this is where you will see all your personalized articles and videos. LinkedIn uses a specific algorithm that brings to your certain topics and articles that will be useful to read, so this just shows how important it is to go over your feed (Schinkten, 2018). Also, by following certain companies such as Apple will alter your feed, this will bring you articles and post that are published by that company (Schinkten, 2018). The more companies and organization you follow the more useful information is brought to you.

Because you will use LinkedIn everyday, it is important to take care of your digital footprint, this is because organizations look at your footprint, this will then be the deciding factor for a future job opportunity (Schinkten, 2018). Therefore, it is important to not put any information online that can harm you in the future. Certain tips to avoid negative digital footprint include, avoiding references to drugs and alcohol, bad-mouthing others, discriminatory behaviour and poor communication skills (Schinkten, 2018).

LinkedIn Learning is another useful tool to use. This platform provides you with resources such as videos that talk about important topics (Schinkten, 2018). These videos help you to know useful tips for the real world. This tool will help you gain skills that many organizations need you to require today.

Job Search and Company Research

LinkedIn is a very useful tool in which you can search for potential jobs. One way to search for jobs is by looking at company pages on LinkedIn and then look at the jobs listed on the page (Schinkten, 2018). By searching this way, you can learn about all the requirements and see if there is a job that pertains to your field of interest.

Another way to find jobs is by using the jobs tab on the LinkedIn page. Here you can specify which job you are looking for and in which area, you can also see and pick when the job was posted (Schinkten, 2018). By using this feature, you can really narrow down the type of career job you are looking for, for example, you may only want to find entry-level jobs.

Manage Your LinkedIn Account

You can customize your LinkedIn account even more; you can do this by going over your settings and privacy. Here you can go over your account, privacy and communication (Schinkten, 2018). In the account section, you can update or add emails, phone numbers and even change your language settings (Schinkten, 2018). In the privacy section you pick whether to keep your profile public or private, you can even hide specific sections (Schinkten, 2018). At the communication section, you can specify who can send you emails, and even choose the types of emails (Schinkten, 2018).

In your setting, you can also download all your data from LinkedIn (Schinkten, 2018). It is useful to do, this because if you download the data you can back it up and store it for future use.

Conclusion

Today went over why LinkedIn is useful, and how everyone should create an account. We talk about creating a LinkedIn profile, building your network, using LinkedIn day-to-day, job search and company research, and managing your LinkedIn account. Below you can see an example of my personal LinkedIn account. You will see before and after pictures of my account and what I did to improve it.

You can see all the improvements I made in the three pictures below, labelled under after. These improvements include adding a profile picture, and my current education. I also added all the licences I received from LinkedIn Learning. Furthermore, I included my volunteer experience and all my skills. As you see, it is important to always update your profile, and add all the new accomplishments. At the end, the more time you put in on your LinkedIn account, the more job opportunities you will receive.

Before: