If you're thinking along these lines, believe me, you won't be alone!
January is one of the key times of the year for people to consider their career options. It is also often the time of year that businesses begin their new financial year and so budgets that may have been under pressure towards the end of the previous year are opened up once more.
In our November newsletter, we included some top tips to help you prepare for your next career move, you can view them here.
Today, we're encouraging you to review your LinkedIn profile and bring it completely up to date. LinkedIn is constantly evolving, so you might find things a little different to the last time you used the platform, here are some of the things you need to consider:
- Profile videos have gone. If you previously recorded one, it will have disappeared just before Christmas. So even more important to make sure you have a professional headshot-type profile photo heading up your page.
- Your cover photo or profile banner is a great place to get creative. Why not use the free design tool Canva, to create a personalised cover photo? It's useful to include your email address and even your phone number here so no one has to go searching for the information. Make it colourful and eye-catching to help you stand out from the crowd. Leaving it grey and photoless is a missed opportunity.
- Turn on Creator Mode - you'll get a host of additional features and people will be able to choose to just follow you or connect and follow you.
- Are you a lurker or a liker? If you're the former, I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and start liking some posts. Doing this has a multitude of benefits, not least getting your profile 'out there' for people to look at. Steer clear of political posts or clickbait posts, and keep it professional as your activity can be viewed by anyone looking at your profile.
- Comment as much as possible. Nothing too bland i.e. great post! Try to ask a question or make an observation based on your own experience, comments drive engagement and engagement drive views of your profile and get you noticed.
- Sharing or reposting other people's posts doesn't do a lot for engagement with your profile, but it is at least something and will show people the kind of things you are interested in, so share wisely. Again, stay away from political and clickbait posts.
- Use the 'Activity' section to feature posts that you have written or links to articles or media that you'd like to share. If it's your creation even better, but if not, it still shows what you are interested in and gives viewers of your profile a great picture of you.
- Your About section should be all about you. You've got 2,600 characters including spaces to tell people what you're about and why they should hire you. Whatever you write here, make sure that it has relevance and symmetry with your CV. Make use of the Top Skills section, pulling out what they are so visitors to your profile can easily see them.
- Your Experience section should match your CV. Profile viewers shouldn't find any surprises here, there shouldn't be any gaps and try to write at least a paragraph about the previous jobs and roles you've had, you've got 2,000 characters to work with here, so maximise them all if you can! You can also include links to different media items in your Experience section, so if you've got something to share which shows you off, then why not?
- The posts that get the most engagement are personal posts, video posts, posts with photos (not stock photos) and carousels. Don't be tempted to use generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT to wholly write your posts, they are very obvious to regular users of LinkedIn. By all means, use AI to generate ideas, tidy up your work and make suggestions for betterment, but posting directly from AI-generated content isn't the best way forward.
I follow Richard van der Blom on LinkedIn, he's a LinkedIn trainer worth following and shares some great tips, you can sign up for his newsletter here if you're interested in learning more about using LinkedIn.
As ever, the Aspire Jobs team are here to support you in your search for a new job role, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Happy New Year!