Having a brand as a graduating senior is pretty easy to do. In general, you want to start a career in something within your field, and have some personal branding elements that allow you to do that. But more or less, the brand statement of YOU is pretty self-explanatory. You want to BEGIN. My SlideShare presentation from last year helped me brand myself as an individual, but one more connected with my university than my industry.
But now that I’m part of the working world, the networking, personal branding and general enthusiasm is expected, not awe inspiring. If I want to be accepted as a peer to others within my industry, then I cannot get by on the fact that my doings are beyond the ordinary.
Instead of positioning myself as the focused recent-grad, I need to be the slightly-seasoned young professional.
So how exactly make this change?
The strange thing is that a lot of the messaging I want to exude last year remains. I still want to be an optimistic, driven young woman, so a lot of the keywords and phrases that described me last year still describe me today. The main change is the experiences I want to highlight. When graduating college, you pull experience from many of your past internships and extra-curriculars to talk about teamwork or times you were challenged, but moving forward I will primarily talk about my first actual job. Therefore, I was able to finally take off of my LinkedIn profile and resume those experiences that made me stand out before I had an actual position to call my own.
Another thing I realized I needed to change was the person used. Using third-person as an undergrad sort of made sense because I was trying to appear as professional as possible, that I cared deeply for my professional image. Now, I’m trying to make myself a peer to the professionals on LinkedIn, and have decided to use first person. Here I’m able to be myself, and the person BEHIND the professional image that people actually want to connect with.
The most important thing to do when creating (and updating) your LinkedIn profile is to use as many relevant keywords as possible in a coherent way. Find examples of jobs that you would like to have, scour each for keywords, and incorporate those keywords into your summary and experiences. This way, when recruiters do searches, you are very likely to appear.
Head on over to my LinkedIn profile to see the changes to my profile, and connect with me while you’re there! I’d LOVE any feedback you may have, feel free to leave comments!