If you dismiss LinkedIn as just
a social media network for job-seekers, you’re missing out. LinkedIn is also a
great tool if you find yourself in a career rut. Here are three major ways
LinkedIn can help you get un-stuck:
1. Research
If you’re stuck in a job you hate and aren't sure how to move forward in your career, researching the career paths of others can be incredibly illuminating. Understanding how someone got from point A to point B in his career might open your eyes to different ways you can move up the ladder — or closer to a career that excites you — in your own way.
Before LinkedIn, we didn't
really have a way to do this, but now it’s even easier with LinkedIn’s new Field of Study Explorer.
Simply select a field of study (if you’re logged in to LinkedIn, it will
automatically select the field you studied in college, but you can change this
under “Explore More”), and LinkedIn will tell you what others who studied that
field are now doing — even where they’re living and working. It also shows you
profiles of people who studied that field, starting first with your own
connections and then moving on to people you don’t yet know but with whom you
have connections in common. Don’t be afraid to click around and read what
people have chosen to make publicly available. Reverse-engineering the career
paths of others can be helpful if you’re not even sure what the
possibilities are, much less how to accomplish them.
2. Re-brand yourself
Your LinkedIn profile
tells a story about you: your history and path, your skills and interests and
where you might go next. If the experience section seems like just a list of
jobs, your summary is where you tie everything together. It’s your opportunity
to connect the dots for your reader while articulating the best of your
achievements. Your summary will go through many revisions as you gain new
experiences and evolve personally and professionally. Writing about yourself
forces you to consider things from someone else’s perspective and think
objectively about your past. This can open your eyes to new possibilities.
Don’t discount the power of a good headline, either. Most people
just default to using their current position and company, but there are better
ways to make a fuller, more encompassing statement about yourself
professionally. And if you’re job-seeking, don’t put that as your headline! As
the first thing people read about you, it positions you as a beggar — not a
chooser — and makes people worry you’ll just ask them about jobs. A better
option is to describe yourself as the professional you are, whether or not you
have a job. If you were recently laid off from a job as a marketing manager,
you might choose to use something like “Proven marketing manager with eight
years of experience.”
How you choose to portray past experiences is also important.
Let’s say you’re that laid-off marketing manager and you’d like to work on more
digitally focused campaigns at your next job. In that case, you might highlight
the digital aspects of your prior projects by pointing them out first in the
experience description.
3. Reach out
What’s the point of a network
if you don’t connect with others? This is where you take your
research a step further and actually connect — in real life — with people in
your industry or who started from the same place. There’s definitely a right
and a wrong way to do this, but most people are happy to help
others; they’re flattered you want their advice, and if you end up
being successful, they get value from the relationship as well. Making it easy
for them to say yes is the tricky part; you don’t want to burden them with a
long email or ask for too much of their time. Ramit Sethi’s blog has
smart advice on how to approach people the right way for mentorship.
Thinking creatively and proactively about your trajectory is a necessary
part of moving forward in your professional life, and LinkedIn can be an
excellent resource and tool to help you map your career.
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