How LinkedIn Helps Engineers
Posted by Hannah Watanabe on August 31st, 2011
LinkedIn is the most adopted and respected social networking site in the engineering community. There are many professional advantages to using LinkedIn. Below are several education slides that we created to discuss with engineers how they can benefit from using LinkedIn and take advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer.
One of the best ways to increase your knowledge about a particular topic, especially one related to your job, is to discuss it with others. Some engineers have used LinkedIn Groups to create very lively discussion groups on topics that they are interested in. Here are two groups that serve as good examples: Low Power and Power Management Designs and Design Verification Professionals. To take a deeper look into how to use LinkedIn Groups, checkout the U.S. News article, How to Use LinkedIn Groups to Build Relationships, by Lindsay Olson.
Having a profile on LinkedIn not only allows you to search for jobs, but for jobs to find you. Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates for jobs they are trying to fill.
By building your network on LinkedIn and utilizing all of its features, you are in turn creating an online portfolio of your professional experience that can be used to help you land a job.
From monitoring the metrics for our blogs here at Synopsys, we have discovered that the number of views for a particular blog post increases when the post is shared on LinkedIn. For example in the month of June, On the Move, a blog written by Hezi Saar, received over 1,000 views and 36% of those views were referrals from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has realized the value in giving companies a voice as well. Many companies have groups where customers can discuss their products. Companies can also take advantage of Company Pages. A feature that was recently added allows companies to make updates, as if they too were a person, that shows up in people’s feeds. If you follow companies, you’ll receive their updates in your home feed.
Some people are selective about who they add to their network according to the relationship they have with the person. Others are more open to connecting with anyone.
If you maximize your profile on LinkedIn, you’ll maximize what LinkedIn can do for you, which is to tell other professionals about you.
How do you use LinkedIn? Do you have any questions? We would love to hear from you! Please leave your comments below.
I have used linkedin for 10 years or so and have 300+ real connections (hating the way linkedin have changed “connectionc” to “followers”, btw).
The groups are especially useful if managed correctly, howver, they can become market stalls pretty quickly if not managed. who wants to join a group just ot be sold at?
but by far the most useful thing are the connections of ones connections, and the connections of the conne3ctions of ones connections. pretty soon one has a self-updating searchable database of millions of people in our industry. truly unique and powerful. I recommend it to anybodsy not already linked in.
Doug
Thanks for the input, Doug! We completely agree that the connections that can be made through LinkedIn are really invaluable to building your network.