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Returning to STEM
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2 Making the most of LinkedIn

If you already have a LinkedIn account, the rest of this week’s activities will help you to optimise your account and maximise the opportunities for finding employment.

Activity 1 Joining LinkedIn

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes

If you haven’t already got a LinkedIn account, now is the time to begin by registering and setting up a profile on LinkedIn [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , free of charge.

Discussion

If you need assistance with setting up a LinkedIn account, there are many free tutorials on YouTube that can help you. It might take you a while to gather all of the information that you want in order to populate all the sections of your LinkedIn profile. If you already have a CV, you can cut and paste sections from this into your profile. You don’t need to do all the LinkedIn sections now; you will be looking through these throughout the week.

While you are setting up your LinkedIn account you will be asked if you want to connect with your contacts. You are advised to skip this stage for now; you’ll find out how to make contacts later. One thing to remember while you are in the process of completing and collating all of the information for your LinkedIn profile is not to connect to people or make your profile public until you are sure it is ready for the world to see!

During this course you can take some time to get your profile into a state that you are happy with before making it publicly accessible. If you already have a LinkedIn profile you may want to edit and change your settings while you brush up the content to make it more suitable for its function as a job-seeking tool.

Activity 2 How to use LinkedIn’s privacy settings

Timing: Allow approximately 5 minutes

Before you start to make a profile, you should consider the essential privacy setting changes you need to make. This will ensure that your connections won’t receive updates about your profile changes until you are ready. Make sure that your notifications are switched off so that your connections are not contacted immediately and before you are ready with your profile updates. If you don’t do this, each time you make any kind of change, your connections see this on their newsfeed as a notification. You need to get your profile to a finished state that you are happy with before going public.

Now watch a short video that outlines how to manage your privacy settings on LinkedIn. It’s likely that the site may change over time and not look exactly the same as in the video, but this will still give you a good idea of how to manage your privacy settings.

Download this video clip.Video player: privacy_in_linkedin_512x256.mp4
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