LinkedIn Reflection

LinkedIn has been difficult to get a handle on. I see it as an online CV of sorts with added extras that appear to be either pointless social media gimmicks or underutilised. The endorsed topics, for example. Most people (people who you sometimes don’t even know) endorse you for topics that LinkedIn has preset in a notification for them. There seems to be no process of rectifying whether these are genuine skills you have.

It is great for having potential employers view your profile, see your past work and have direct access to referees for you. In this way, I believe LinkedIn should be used judiciously. So many treat the site as a professional Facebook but forget the ‘professional’ side of networking. They accept everyone to be a connection on the profile, whether they are beneficial to you or not.

Will LinkedIn be useful to me in the librarian profession? Undoubtedly. I believe it is a great tool for getting to know whom you’ve worked with and networked to, and in this way keep contact with them. I’ve been on LinkedIn for a few years now and while it’s not a social media site I utilise to full potential (see Twitter), I do appreciate its merits. Having all my Masters colleagues as well as lecturers available on hand in a web page is imminently valuable if I were to collaborate with them later in my career. My Masters colleagues have already stated that they would be happy to endorse me on skills that I have shown this semester.

As my journey as a library professional opens and I gain more experience in a range of different work environments the CV will grow. The perplexing thing about LinkedIn is the question of how much of your CV should go on the site. Including a full size CV will seem too large for a web site. A friend of mine had this issue with her LinkedIn. I recommended to only show your top priority job experience and groups. The latter is perhaps the biggest problem with LinkedIn. Due to so many only having a passing glance at their LinkedIn, many of the groups send notifications for events that aren’t utilised. For example, I am a part of a QUT Alumni LinkedIn group, and they send my inbox lots of invites to events that they presume I would have as much interest as a Facebook group user. The main problem with LinkedIn is that it doesn’t look attractive and isn’t user friendly, and while it may try to ape other social networks, the place is too drab.

On the networking side of things, I see LinkedIn as being a solid foundation.