Setting Up Your LinkedIn Profile

A great way to boost your visibility to employers in our increasingly digital world is through creating a LinkedIn profile for yourself. This post will help you create a strong profile that gives you a professional image. Think of your LinkedIn profile as being a broader, more publicly visible version of your resume to show the world of work what you have to offer. Here are the main topics for this post:

-            Getting through the setup steps

-            Creating a quality, professional looking profile

-            Using your profile to start networking

Getting through the setup steps

What to consider ahead of time

As you go through the steps to set up your LinkedIn profile, you’ll be asked to provide basic personal information. You’ll probably know this information right off the top of your head and shouldn’t need to do any special information gathering. That said, you’ll probably be excited to get your profile launched as soon as possible once you start setting it up, so think about what specific skills and experience you want to add. For your About section, reflect on what you’d like prospective hiring managers to know about your professional self in the form of one or two medium-length paragraphs; try to describe yourself in a way that mentions what work activities you like to do, what you’re really good at, and how you envision those activities helping other people (or a company). One more thing to consider is adding a professional catchphrase to your profile headline, like an example of “Delighting customers with excellent service!” if that’s what you’ve done well in previous jobs and want to continue doing. It’s common for people to state their current role at their company here, which is fine, but that might not describe what you’re good at, love doing, and how you provide value quite as well as a thoughtful catchphrase can.

Advantages of having a profile

Two major advantages of having a LinkedIn profile are that you can more easily share about your professional self with others and learn more easily about other professionals out there. As simple as those things sound, try to imagine how much more work it was, or how much more limited your reach would have been, before social media made connecting easier! By sharing about your skills and experience in this way, more hiring managers can learn what you have to offer, and others who know you can easily connect you with a hiring manager they know who is looking for someone like you! And since, as you’ll read in the Networking post coming soon, networking is about giving as much as getting, you can use the network of contacts you accrue on LinkedIn to help connect others with opportunities, too!

Steps from LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides step-by-step instructions to set up your profile at the following link: Create a good LinkedIn profile | LinkedIn Help.

Creating a quality, professional looking profile

Just like with your resume, quality and accuracy are paramount on your LinkedIn profile. In addition to gaining the trust of others through both of those attributes, your profile will just look more professional and you’ll be able to feel it when reviewing your fully completed and published profile. Once you think your profile is all set, ask your support person to review it on their device as if a hiring manager was looking it over. That person can help catch any typos you missed and ensure you’re presenting yourself in the best, most compelling light possible. Also, make yourself a quarterly recurring reminder to review your LinkedIn profile for any updates you should make to keep it current.

An important part of a professional looking LinkedIn profile is a professional headshot. You’ll see that most people on LinkedIn have one, and you’ll probably agree that anytime you see a profile with no photo or one that isn’t good quality, it immediately makes you less interested in viewing that profile. The same will apply to others viewing your profile, so make sure it looks as sharp as possible.

If you don’t have the money to hire a photographer for a professional headshot, you may be able to get one for free or at a discount at a job fair. Also, AI tools are becoming available to help you produce a professional looking headshot, but if you use these tools, make sure that the picture looks indistinguishable from what a professional headshot would look like.

Using your profile to start networking

Once your profile is set up, proofread, and finalized, you’re ready to use it to start networking! Networking helps you become aware of more job opportunities and enables you to also help others find them. This topic will be covered in its own post coming up soon, as it’s a large enough topic to deserve at least a dedicated post, if not its own series of posts. When you meet with people in-person, that’s an opportunity to connect with them on LinkedIn sometime within a day or two after that. You can make new connections at job and career fairs, professional association meetings, or other events, but that’s to be covered more in the Networking post.

Conclusion

Setting up a LinkedIn profile is a great way to boost your professional visibility, both to get your next higher paying job and to improve your career prospects longer-term. Think about what information you want to share with the professional world and use LinkedIn’s guide for setting up your profile to get it done in the best and easiest way possible. Treat information added to your profile just like you would treat information on your resume, keeping quality and accuracy of that information as the top priority. Getting another person to review your profile and including a good quality, professional looking photo are important steps for creating a successful profile. Once you’ve done all of this, you’re ready to use LinkedIn to greatly enhance your professional networking abilities!

Start setting up your LinkedIn profile today and mark your calendar with specific dates to complete any part of it that you can’t get done today!

The next step on the roadmap: Coming in a few days – stay tuned!

Writing Your Best Resume

Now that you’ve completed some self-assessments about your skills, interests, and employment readiness, it’s time to start working on documentation you’ll put in front of prospective employers when applying for a better paying job. Today’s post will focus on creating a resume and will be about double the length of a typical ALRS post, so feel free to spend two days on this topic if needed to digest all the content and complete actions. Here are the main topics for this post:

-            Viewing sample resumes to get a sense of what your resume should look like

-            Adopting a general resume writing process, including documenting all relevant experience and skills

-            Reviewing your online footprint via both web search and social media

Viewing sample resumes to get a sense of what your resume should look like

A resume is a document that summarizes your work experience, typically in one or two pages, with enough detail to help the reader decide if you are a good enough fit for the job that they should interview you. If you’re new to writing a resume, a good place to start is by looking at sample resumes to get a vision of what “right” looks like in your mind. On the CareerForce job seeking website, you would navigate to the Resumes page and scroll down to the links to sample resumes shown here:

Links to CareerForce resume samples and templates.

One common layout is the chronological resume, which starts with your name and contact information, then the job title you’re applying for, then employment history as the bulk of the resume, and then education and certifications at the bottom. The hiring manager or an assistant screening all the resumes submitted for a job will maybe spend about 30 seconds scanning over each one, so you need to make sure key information is easy for them to quickly locate on your resume.

Adopting a general process to document all relevant experience and skills

Remember to keep your goal of the next, better paying job front and center. Be sure to firmly decide on the next job title you want to pursue before drafting your resume. You don’t have to decide on where you’ll be doing that job and maybe not even what industry to do it in, but it would be a shame to spend hours getting a resume just right for one job only to decide you want to pursue a different job after all. All your work experience and skills that you mention on your resume should be oriented around the job that you are competing for. In fact, part of your resume review process should be to try to screen out any information on your resume that does not help you stand out as the right person to be hired for that job.

Select a job title you’re qualified for before drafting your resume – if you’re not yet qualified for the job you want, find a steppingstone job you are qualified for that will help you get to the one you want in a few years. Applying to a job beyond your qualifications just wastes your time and effort and annoys the recipient of your application, potentially causing them to not take you seriously later if your name ever comes up again. Steppingstone jobs are a great way to gain relevant experience for the job you want and avoid the common trap of “I’m seeking a job that requires three years of experience, but if I can’t get hired, how do I get three years of experience?”.

Another preparatory step that’s worth taking before drafting your resume is to review your job seeker website for tips on writing a strong resume. An example of this, on the CareerForce Resumes page linked above, is shown here:

Tips from CareerForce for writing a strong resume.

Finally, log into your job seeker account and look for any tools they have on the resumes page to help you create your resume. You can always draft one from scratch, but if you have access to a resume building tool, use it as much as it helps you! Save your resume to your job seeker dashboard to maximize opportunities to use both technical tools and any personalized support available from your career services agency.

Logging into CareerForce and clicking on the My Resumes tab to access the resume builder.

Starting to use the CareerForce resume builder.

One thing to expect is that as you go through your days ahead, you’ll think of a thing here or there to update on your resume to make it just a little bit more polished. This is a good reason to write down your ideas – you never know when a great idea will strike only to be forgotten by the time you get home from an errand or when you wake up the next morning. While you won’t need to make big changes to your resume very often, it will be somewhat of a living document as you add new accomplishments or find better ways to “wordsmith” what you already have on there.

Once your resume is drafted to the point where you feel like it’s “finished”, ask your support person to review your resume for any typos or to identify any improvements they think you could make. Expect to spend a bit more time correcting any issues and figuring out how to more clearly word anything that could be ambiguous or confusing to a reader who doesn’t know you. It may even help to set your resume aside for at least one week, then come back to it and read it almost as if you’re reviewing someone else’s resume to give them feedback.

Reviewing your online footprint via both web search and social media

Search for yourself

Type your name into the top few internet search engines. What do you find? If you have a very common name or one identical to a celebrity’s, it might be hard to find information about you personally. Maybe along with your name you also have to include the name of a specific organization or geographical area you’ve belonged to in the past. Having a less common name makes it easier to discover what information a hiring manager can find about you on the internet.

In addition to seeing what others can learn about you through a simple web search, proactively review your social media history for anything that could be off-putting to a prospective employer. Consider both photos and remarks on personal social media or on the web that could make you look unprofessional or make the hiring organization look bad if they hired you. Update or delete anything that could hurt your employability wherever you can and be ready to explain in an interview if there is any negative information about you that is beyond your control to remove. If you’re candid and truthful about anything negative and what you’ve learned from it, interviewers may be understanding and appreciate your commitment to being truthful even when it’s not flattering or comfortable.

Create a professional image

If you’re just starting out in your career and looking for a higher paying job that doesn’t require a degree, you might not need a LinkedIn profile. However, it’s a good idea to set one up for the following reasons:

1.       The hiring manager may be interested in your LinkedIn profile along with your resume, to learn more about you than you can fit on a resume.

2.       Having a LinkedIn profile even before you need one could impress the hiring manager and help you stand out from other candidates.

For this post, just focus on writing the best resume you can. The next post, linked below, will guide you through creating a solid LinkedIn profile as an online supplement to the resume you’ll submit with job applications. Once your LinkedIn profile is set up, you can add a hyperlink to it onto your resume.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’re now starting to create a portfolio about your professional self that will help you land a higher paying job and launch your career! A resume is one of several components of your portfolio, but it’s arguably one of the most central; focus on quality and accuracy above all else and keep looking for ways to improve it over time. Use samples to get an idea of what your resume should look like, then use an orderly resume writing process to produce it. Make sure this process starts with a firm decision on the job title for your resume, as everything else you write should support getting a job interview for that specific job title. Aim for what you’re qualified for now, even if it’s a steppingstone job. Ask others to review your resume after you think it’s ready to ensure it looks as good as possible; they’ll probably find some updates to make that you didn’t see. Check for information available about you online, both good and bad, and consider digitally augmenting your resume by setting up a LinkedIn profile. Take the time you need to write the very best resume you can with the skills and experience you have, even if it takes a few dedicated, focused days.

Start writing your resume as the next step to landing your next, higher paying job!

The next step on the roadmap: Setting Up Your LinkedIn Profile

Assessing Your Skill Depth

Along with the work you’ve done from the previous two posts to assess your skills and interests, CareerForce offers another assessment called the Skills Matcher to assess your level of expertise in 40 different skills. In addition to better understanding your strongest skills to share with prospective employers, this assessment can point out less developed skills that need improvement to help you gain better employment. After completing this assessment, review your full list of skills that you recently made and rate every skill either using your best judgment or seeking help from your support person to accurately assess your strength at all the skills you have.

-            Log into your job seeker account and complete your Skills Matcher assessment

o   Be sure to save your results for future reference

o   If one is not available on your state’s job seeker website, you might benefit from taking the CareerForce assessment, but know that you won’t be eligible for appointments, events, or other such personal support from CareerForce if you’re not a Minnesota resident

-            Read through the results of your assessment and reflect on your depth in various skills

-            Review your list of skills from the other day and rate each one with the 1 to 5 scale used for the Skills Matcher assessment, to help you see where you’re already strong and what to work on next

Complete your Skills Matcher assessment

Log into your job seeker account and look for an assessment like the one linked above. If using a CareerForce account, completing this 40-question assessment should only take about fifteen minutes. A preview of this assessment is shown here:

A sample of the CareerForce Skills Matcher assessment.

Notice that the skill level increases exponentially from Beginner to Expert; going from Beginner to Skilled is a much smaller jump than going from Skilled to Expert. It’s okay if you have few or even no skills at the Expert level on this scale; use that level as a longer-term goal to reach for any skills relevant to your career goals. The most important outcome of this assessment is to gauge how advanced you are at various skills, which can help to narrow down what job you should try to get next or what skills you need to deepen to prepare for the work you want.

Read and reflect on your assessment results

After completing your assessment, consider some questions and ideas like these:

1.       Was there anything about your assessment results that surprised you?

2.       Maybe your results suggested you’re stronger or weaker at a given skill than you expected, or maybe the assessment made you aware of skills that you’ve never considered before.

3.       As you review the careers recommended in your results, does any one career stick out to you as promising and worth a closer look, based on its wages, educational requirements, and long-term outlook?

Don’t limit yourself to considering just the career suggestions that show up in these results. Use them to broaden your employment considerations and to better understand the details of those careers.

Rate the skills you recently identified

Going beyond this assessment itself, you should try to candidly rate your level for each of the skills you’ve recently identified on the same scale. Rating your skills alongside your support person can improve the accuracy of your assessment by that person acting as a sounding board and providing their own perspective. As you rate each skill, you’ll identify ones that you want to improve on both for your next job and to advance your career where you want it to go in the long run. On top of helping you more accurately assess your current skill levels, your support person may have good ideas about what you can do to improve specific skills.

Conclusion

Complete your Skills Matcher assessment today to better understand your depth in specific skills and how that lines up with different career options. Be open-minded about the results in case you find your depth in a skill to be different from what you expected, or you discover a skill that you weren’t aware of before. Even if you’re not at an expert level for any skill in the assessment or on your personal skill list, don’t be discouraged and use that level of skill as a goal for your longer-term professional development. Rate each of your skills to make your skills profile more useful for preparing for and landing your next job and making more money!

Log into your job seeker account and complete your Skills Matcher assessment right away!

The next step on the roadmap: Writing Your Best Resume