Making the Most of LinkedIn®: A Guide for Beginners

This is a guest post written by Cicely Rude, a post-academic turned language consultant and coach. See her website here. Thanks for the awesome advice, Cicely!

LinkedIn® has become a powerful professional networking, job search, and career development tool with multilingual capabilities. Building a solid network of contacts is an important and ongoing part of career development. For that reason, I've created the following introduction to some of the ways that you can optimize your LinkedIn® profile, build your professional network, find your next job, and advance your career. It is written with multilingual as well as monolingual job seekers in mind. For more information read 13 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Find a Great Job.

What is LinkedIn? 

LinkedIn® is a professional networking website. As of June 2012, LinkedIn® reports more than 175 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia.

 

How can I make the most of LinkedIn®?

• Create professional profiles and invite others to become connections, thus building a network of professional contacts. 


• Create parallel profiles in multiple languages. 


• Build a network of first, second, and third-degree contacts. 


• Request introductions through the contact network. 


• Find targeted jobs, companies, people, and business opportunities. 


• Upload an online profile that showcases experience, projects, and skills. 


• Gather recommendations for professional or academic work. 


• Review the profiles of hiring managers and find contacts who can introduce them to you. 


• Follow companies and receive notifications of new job postings. 
  

 

How about employers and recruiters? 

• Employers list jobs and search for potential candidates. 


• Recruiters search for people who match the requirements for particular jobs, then contact those people through LinkedIn®, so make sure your profile is fabulous, succinct, and current. 

 

Things to keep in mind when building a LinkedIn® profile:

• Build a complete profile. 


• Add names of schools you attended and companies you worked for, so the system can find possible connections. 


• Include the dates during which you worked each job or attended each academic institution. 


• Add the languages in which you are proficient, projects you have worked on, etc. 


• Keep your profile current, even when not job-hunting. 

©2013
Cicely Rude
English Language, Culture and Curriculum Consultant
www.cicelyrude.com

A great career advice podcast with Julie Clarenbach

A post-ac blogger, Unemployed Philosopher, has a nea-to post-ac podcast and recently interviewed post-academic career coach Julie Clarenbach. Julie left a tenure track job in technical writing to become a post-ac career coach. She works at Escape the Ivory Tower (she calls post-acs "escape artists"). This covers so many of those initial concerns we have about moving into "real world" careers: networking, emotions, next steps, cover letters, etc. It's a great listen! Add it to your podcast and listen to it after the Freakonomics podcast on Quitting and you'll be fired up and ready to go!

Martin Fisch via Compfight

Link Roundup: Job Materials for Non-Academic Jobs

One of the most confusing parts of the transition out of academia is figuring out how to transform our academic CVs and letters -- and our academic work -- into marketable materials for "real world" jobs. Taking a 10 page CV and making it into a 2 page resume when most of your experience centers around writing center tutoring or lab work can be disheartening and confusing. These links help you make sense of what "real world" employers are looking for, and how to transfer your academic life into terms that make sense to those outside the ivory tower.

Khalil Shah via Compfight

FWIW, a career coach or service can be very helpful if you're really struggling. Julie Clarenbach and Jo Van Every are post-academics who work as career coaches for post-academics! They have a couple e-courses as well.

Versatile PhD is our #1 favorite go-to catch-all source for career issues after academia. There is far more knowledge and support there than we can offer here.

(Post)Gradland is an ex-academic who ended up on a job search committee for her web content company that hired a PhD for a non-academic position and had this to say about the materials they received:

Academics, especially those of us in the humanities, have a tendency to ramble. This does not go over well in the private sector. It’s likely that the person reviewing your resume is someone like me, who is not a professional resume-reviewer and has maybe 15-20 minutes a day to devote to reading resumes and cover letters. I received one application from someone who had excellent qualifications but had written a five-page cover letter, much of it containing irrelevant information. This immediately gave me a bad impression of the person–simply put, I don’t want to be working long hours with someone who takes forever to get to the point. Your cover letter shouldn’t be longer than a page.

 

This excellent post from Leaving Academia summarizes the many fears we face when we start to consider a non-academic job search, and offers a lot of practical wisdom as you make this transition. Here's a taste:

You also developed other practical and marketable skills in your academic life. For example, you didn’t only write a Master’s thesis, course papers, or a doctoral dissertation. You also managed large volumes of information, established a data-storage system (both electronic and hard copy), and edited manuscript copy. You were a creative thinker, you adapted and navigated your way around unanticipated barriers (of the intellectual variety), and saw projects through to completion. You worked independently but consulted others for their expertise. And don’t forget all those “soft skills” that a PhD helps you cultivate:

• you are a master/mistress of time management and meeting deadlines


• you have superior organizational skills


• you learn things quickly and grasp complex ideas easily


• you are disciplined, motivated, and a self-starter


• you enjoy a challenge

Once you learn how to articulate your transferable skills, you will be able to explain in a job interview how well your background – graduate school and all – prepared you for the line of work described in the job ad.

The long and short of all of these sites is that yes, you do have skills that are valuable. The trick will be articulating how your background in academia prepared you for the specific tasks and duties of the specific job you're looking at. Good luck! And check out our other articles about the career transition after academia.