In this week’s guest blog post, Liz Wilkinson and Natasha Weller discuss how using LinkedIn can support professional resilience and create new career opportunities.
Liz: First off, how do you personally use LinkedIn, Natasha?
Natasha: As I’m self-employed, LinkedIn is now primarily a place for me to be visible to potential clients and to share my work. I love using it to maintain connections with former colleagues, clients and friends. I learn a lot from reading posts and seeing interesting opportunities – from roles to events and training. And of course, I help my clients to optimise their profiles and LinkedIn usage in line with their personal objectives.
How about you, Liz?
L: In my role at the University of London, I use it to promote university events and to celebrate our students’ achievements. But as an individual, I also use it to build and enrich my professional community. I just love the way that LinkedIn makes my national and international community of fellow-travellers in careers and education more visible to me. So I do a lot of ‘cheering on’ on LinkedIn and boosting good work, but I also use it as a learning tool to discover new people who are working in parallel fields and who help me broaden my working identity from being part of the careers tribe to being part of the educator tribe.
N: I’ve noticed – and appreciated – your ‘cheering on’ of others! What are your thoughts on balancing self-promotion with support for others?
L: I think one of the things that interests me about LinkedIn is different people’s comfort and cultural influences about what is showing off. As a woman of my generation, starting work in the 1980s, I was certainly encouraged not to show off. Since then I’ve done a lot of coaching to empower people, especially women, to claim and communicate their legitimate professional pride. For me, when I do post, I feel more comfortable seeing it as an opportunity to celebrate the area I work in or the organisation and people I work with.
N: That discomfort definitely comes up a lot with my clients too. People often don’t know where to start or what to post.
Some advice on this: you don’t have to start posting daily – or even weekly! A starting point could be to share something that’s not too personal – something about the work of your organisation / field, or takeaways from an event or report. Over time, posting gets easier and you become more comfortable to share your own thoughts and work wins.
Your posts help shape the impression people get when they click on your LinkedIn profile or see you in their feed. They are a mechanism for connection, opening yourself to opportunities and building your professional resilience and brand. But it’s not just about posting…
L: Indeed. For me, LinkedIn is a place for me to learn new things, pick up on hot topics and trends, and to keep modern. All part of my “I’m not dead yet” strategy.
N: Maintaining connection is so important for professional resilience! There’s a lot of redundancies right now, hitting people by surprise quite often. And a lot of people say to me, “ I wish I’d made more effort with my professional network before this happened!”.
L: Is there any other advice you would give to people using LinkedIn when looking for new opportunities?
N: You don’t want your profile to appear stagnant and empty when someone clicks on it. You can use it to create the impression you want people to have of you.
Here are a few tips:
- Headline: It doesn’t have to be your job title and organisation. You can use it to showcase your specialism, impact and/or core skills
- About section: Tell your story. Make it engaging to read, show your impact and (if appropriate work-wise) state the kind of work you want to do next
- Featured post section: Pin key posts or media to show off your work and things you don’t want people to miss
- Engagement: Your comments on and reactions to posts show in the activity tab, offering others a flavour of you (although you can also hide this in your settings if desired)
- Recommendations: Invite colleagues / clients to add a short recommendation to your profile – it’s a great way to add credibility
L: People are often so worried about how their profile looks. I like to use a dance floor metaphor – while your profile (the outfit) matters, what really counts is how you engage (how you dance).
You can also look at other profiles in your field to get inspiration and a sense of the norms for your field – how to dress (your profile) and how to dance (post, interact etc)!
N: That’s such a great metaphor. Also it’s worth remembering no one scrutinises your profile as much as you do.
A post will be skim read and it’s highly unlikely someone is going to analyse every minute detail of your profile page. You need it to make a good impression but there’s so much more you can do with LinkedIn!
LinkedIn is such a good tool for learning, career exploration, interview preparation and so on. Looking at company pages, people’s profiles, just being aware of what else is out there beyond your current organisation. And you can change your visibility settings if you don’t want people knowing you’ve been on their profile!
L: I’ve heard people in research and academia say that LinkedIn is a corporate platform. But that’s not true anymore – there’s plenty of non corporate people and you will find your tribe there!
N: Exactly. And like all social platforms, LinkedIn tends to show you what it thinks you want to see based on other content you’ve read and people you’ve interacted with. For example, last week after I liked a few posts from people attending the AGCAS conference, my feed was full with every post going about that conference, whether I knew the poster or not!
L: That’s why I try to interact with a variety of posts – to bring more range into my feed. I’ve also found that, at this stage in my career, my network is expanding rather than shrinking—even as some contemporaries begin to retire. LinkedIn helps me build new inspiring connections beyond my immediate colleagues.
N: It’s so beneficial for your professional resilience – creating new options, new conversations, and new paths before you need them. Then, when you do need them, you’re not starting from scratch.
L: And it isn’t just about getting a new job. Professional resilience is also that ability to reinvent in places which can be more important as you get older. It can help you to stay at the cutting edge of what you do, by identifying interesting people and current thinking.
L: Are there any lesser known tools or tricks on LinkedIn you’d also recommend?
N: Here’s a few:
- Open to work (but discreetly). Underneath your name, when you look at your own profile, it has ‘open to work settings’. If you click on that, there’s a way that you can show that you’re open to being contacted about opportunities but it’s not publicly on your profile (no visible green banner!). Only recruiters see that. You can add the kind of job titles you’re interested in. I’ve seen people turn that on and literally they get contacted straight away by recruiters. Even if you’re not actively job hunting, it’s always good to know about opportunities!
- Post design: Adding an image to your post makes it more likely to stop the scroll, even better if it’s a picture of you. Having spacing in your post rather than huge chunks of text (like with your CV!). And avoid just reposting someone’s post as it’s less likely to get seen. Commenting with your thoughts on a repost is better.
L: Great tips! Talking with you has updated my thinking on how we can use LinkedIn to enhance our career resilience by building professional community.
N: I agree. In times of uncertainty and change like now, it’s good to think about future-proofing our careers – and LinkedIn is a tool in our armory for that. So many of my clients have had brilliant opportunities and learning come to them from this platform.
Natasha is a career coach who works with mid-career professionals feeling stuck in their career and supports them to find and achieve a new direction, through her coaching and training business FutureProsper.
Liz is currently a Senior Careers Consultant at the University of London. She has been encouraging students and colleagues to develop their career resilience for 35 years.