A LinkedIn profile is currently one of the most effective ways to find a new, better job in the IT industry. It is through LinkedIn that thousands of developers have changed their career paths and tried something new in recent years. How do you create an effective LinkedIn profile that will help you change jobs in IT or start your journey in this industry? What is LinkedIn and what is it used for?
LinkedIn is one of the world’s most popular social networking sites, though it differs slightly in its application from other well-known social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.
LinkedIn is designed as a service to support and help establish new business contacts, both for entrepreneurs and for those employed under a standard employment contract. Depending on our determination and commitment to building a LinkedIn profile, we can use it to find new projects or connect with headhunters who will help us find a better job. It is also common for a company interested in our skills to propose a meeting that may result in a future collaboration. LinkedIn has perfectly tapped into the needs of modern business, gaining huge popularity among people interested in developing their professional careers.
What elements should you focus on to make your account attract the attention of employers?
Proper preparation of a LinkedIn profile will guarantee us significant popularity among potential employers or business contractors, but as with any other activity, we must dedicate some energy and time to polishing our profile. What should we pay special attention to in order to make our LinkedIn profile attractive? It is worth focusing on:
- Completing the profile fully;
- Preparing a professional photo;
- Describing your professional experience and education;
- Describing your skills confirmed by certificates;
- An interesting and concrete description of your professional achievements;
Let’s go through each of the above points in detail and see how to prepare a professional LinkedIn profile.
Complete profile completion
Let’s start creating a professional profile by filling it in with all the necessary data in detail. It is extremely important to include basic personal information, contact details, a list of the most important professional experiences, skills, and competencies in your profile. Do not forget about such issues as choosing a photo, creating an appropriate headline, and writing a professional summary.
In short, our profile should be complete for the visitor, and what’s more, it should encourage them to initiate contact with us. However, if we do not provide basic data, such as an email address or phone number, we cannot count on interesting collaboration proposals.
A good and representative photo
A profile photo on LinkedIn is, like it or not, our business card, which will largely decide whether a potential headhunter or recruiter will even want to write to us. If we are wondering whether to add a photo to our profile at all, we can safely end these considerations and realize that a profile without a photo will not be considered at all for serious proposals.
If we have professional hopes for our LinkedIn profile, a photo is mandatory. Remember to make the photo professional. Do not use the same photo you have on Facebook or Instagram. LinkedIn is a business portal, and we should stick to that. Therefore, elegant attire, a clear shot of your face, and a relatively current appearance are guarantees of success in business contacts.
Present your professional experience and education
Describing your professional experience and education to date is a key element that all recruiters looking for specialists in a given industry will pay attention to. The job title and workplace are the minimum, which is worth expanding with detailed information related to the duties we performed in the past. Education is an equally important point that confirms our knowledge and competencies acquired at universities. The education section should be particularly well described if we cannot boast of too much professional experience. We should treat our LinkedIn profile like a virtual CV that every employer reviews. Starting from this assumption,
let’s try to ensure that the described experience and education encourage potential employers to contact us.
Include recommendations confirming your skills
Describing your skills and competencies is an integral part of creating a professional profile on LinkedIn, but a lack of credible evidence confirming their acquisition will not reflect well on us.
When describing your skills, you should always present the certificates obtained, completed training, and courses, along with the date of completion and the entity responsible for organizing the given course. A recruiter who notices a large number of professional development activities on our profile will form an opinion of us as someone who does not rest on their laurels and is constantly trying to deepen their knowledge. These are exactly the kind of employees that success-oriented organizations are looking for.
Write a concise professional summary
A professional summary is a section that, from the visitor’s perspective, is at the top of our profile.
This part of our profile is often the only one that will be analyzed by a potential recruiter and employer. It is therefore worth using this bit of space to present your profile as best as possible. A professional summary can have a maximum of 2000 characters. This is not an incredibly large space, so every word must be carefully weighed. What information should be included in a professional summary? First of all, we describe what position and in what industry we work, as well as what companies we have worked for so far. It is worth dedicating some space to describing your greatest achievements, as well as discussing the specialized competencies we possess.
What if you lack professional experience?
A lack of attractive professional experience is a common problem among people who are just starting their career journey, and a LinkedIn profile is meant to serve as support in the process of looking for their first job, for example in the IT industry. Such people, when designing their profile, should focus on other aspects that distinguish us from the crowd of beginner candidates.
Let’s pay special attention to the education section – let’s make sure to include all relevant stages of education that may seem useful to the employer. Also, don’t forget to describe your skills. Skills should be supported by certificates or projects that we have carried out independently, at university, or during other activities.
Professional experience of a programmer – a key element of a LinkedIn profile
The IT industry is one of those sectors that gains the most through interaction on the social networking site LinkedIn. It is through this medium that practically every self-respecting
IT company looks for new specialists, based on their needs and requirements regarding technical competencies.
Therefore, every IT specialist, programmer, software tester, or data analysis expert has a huge chance for career development thanks to LinkedIn, provided, however, that they put effort into filling out the experience and skills section. In practice, these two sections are sufficient to determine whether a candidate is suitable for an open position. Programmers should accurately list all technologies they have learned, along with information about their experience in using them, as well as projects that have been implemented through them.
Will you see who viewed your profile?
This is a question that every new user of a business social network asks themselves.
Unlike other social networking sites, LinkedIn has an option to preview exactly who visits our profile. This data can tell us a lot about the attractiveness and popularity of our profile among potential employers or recruiters. How to verify who visited our profile? It’s very simple. From the “View Profile” tab, we can click the “who viewed your profile” option. That’s enough to get to know the people who were recently
interested in our virtual CV.
How to generate a CV from LinkedIn?
Due to the specific structure of a user profile on LinkedIn, every user is able to facilitate the process of preparing their own CV and use the CV generator option on LinkedIn. How to do it?
First of all, we must fill in all sections of our profile, including personal and contact data, professional summary, experience, education, skills, and private interests. Then, when everything is prepared, in the
More section, select the
Save to PDF option. That’s enough to generate your CV from LinkedIn.
