10 LinkedIn Tips to Kick-start Your Job Search

10 LinkedIn Tips to Kick-start Your Job Search LinkedIn brands itself as the social network for professionals and a lot of people do use it successfully for sharing information and news about their companies or discussing key issues in their industry. But what can LinkedIn do for the jobseeking professional? Many of us are not as clued in to all of LinkedIns different features as we might be. However, its worth getting to know this social network better as it has a surprising number of tools for helping your job search. Here are ten ways in which we can use LinkedIn in our pursuit for the right career. 1. Check out the jobs section LinkedIn does actually have a dedicated jobs section. Employers post vacancies in the hope that a savvy jobseeker like you will come across them and turn out to be the ideal candidate. Click on the Jobs tab at the top of the homepage and youll be taken to a keyword search box as well as a list of suggested vacancies based on what your profile says. 2. Complete your profile The more complete your LinkedIn profile is, the more jobs LinkedIn will be able to suggest for you. A complete profile obviously also appeals to people viewing it, as the reason theyre looking at it is to find out as much as they can about you. When a potential employer looks at your profile, theyll be forming an opinion based on your tag line, summary box, and specialities. Your experience and education will most probably be important to them too, but you have more freedom in how you word those first three fields mentioned, so make the most of them. Also, right at the bottom theres a field where you can put what youre interested in. This basically means you get to say what youre on LinkedIn for and what people can approach you with. If youre on LinkedIn to boost your job search, dont be shy, select career opportunities! 3. Join Groups Youll get more traffic to your profile if people know you exist. One of the best ways to maintain a visible presence on LinkedIn is to join groups and take part in their discussions. If you join several groups in your chosen career field, chances are you will keep coming across a few people who are also in all those groups. People build up a rapport by contributing to one anothers discussions in their shared groups. You can even start discussions asking for advice related to your job search, such as recommendations for good vocational courses. 4. Get Connected Once youre more familiar with people who share your interests or specialities, youll find yourself with more Connections. Connections are to LinkedIn what Friends are to Facebook and Followers are to Twitter. You can invite people to become a Connection and be invited yourself. Dont wait to be invited though-if you believe someone could be beneficial to you, would genuinely like to connect with them on a deeper level, or just find them really interesting, send that invitation out. A major advantage of being connected to someone is that you can message them for free instead of having to pay for an upgrade to InMail. 5. Get the Messages out Why is the ability to send messages so important? Many LinkedIn Members dont have their email addresses on their public profile, so unless you know someone personally anyway, you have no way to contact them privately other than through the Messages function. Whether you message Connections to ask outright if they know of any job openings, to tap them for information on their organisation, or to arrange a voluntary/shadow placement, do it in the right way. Be clear about why youre contacting them and what youre asking for. Ask them if theres anything *they* need help with. Ive contacted several Connections in this way and theyve been all too happy to help me every time. 6. Take part in the QA Another function that helps you meet people and turn them into Connections is the QA. Here you can ask the whole LinkedIn community questions on almost anything, provided the topic loosely fits in with one of the designated categories. Again, asking questions is useful for getting information and advice on a particular job role, organisation or industry. Its not the quantity of answers that you get but the quality. Ive asked questions and only gotten one answer, but because that answer was useful to me, I went away happy. Just as important is answering questions. Its another way of drawing peoples attention to you and your profile. And if you answer questions on your chosen specialties, potential employers get to see your knowledge and experience in action. 7. Share updates Yes, LinkedIn, like every other social network, has the dreaded status update feature. Use it to your advantage by keeping your Connections up to date with your voluntary work, skills building or networking activities. This lets employers know that youre being active and creative in your job search-showing them your enthusiasm and commitment in targeting the right role. 8. Recommendations People dont just have to take your word for it, though. The Recommendations feature  allows people whove worked together in an organisation or on a project to endorse one another. Each recommendation only has to be 2 or 3 lines: sometimes Ms. Jobseeker is a very competent accountant and very easy to work with. She went out of her way to assist me is enough to help a potential employer or client build up their picture of you. How do you get Recommendations? Ask! On your profile page, click on the Get Recommended link and fill in the form it takes you to. Again, dont be shy-if the features there, you might as well use it! 9. Find events to go to As useful as social networking can be, you dont have to deprive yourself of offline networking. In fact, LinkedIn can even help you find events to attend, as thats yet another thing Members are able to post about. On the home page, roll your pointer over the More tab and select Events from the drop down menu. In Events Home, you can then see which events your Connections are attending or interested in and you can also view the most popular events on the whole of LinkedIn. Click on the Find Events tab for a keyword search filtered by date, location and type. Its a very handy way to quickly find local events connected to your specialities or chosen industry. 10. Explore the other applications There are even more LinkedIn applications that could be of use to you. By getting to the Applications Directory through the More drop down menu, youll see that you can connect your blog and Twitter updates to LinkedIn; share a personalised Amazon reading list, content and presentations; and create polls. Put simply, these are all ways to inform people about yourself and/or gather information for your job search. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the ways a jobseeker can use LinkedIn. As with all online platforms, its both fun and helpful to play around with it for a bit, using these tips to lay the foundations. Once youve found other ways to make LinkedIn work for you, be sure to let us in on the secret! In fact, you probably already have a few tips of your own, so feel free to share them with us. Nisa Chitakasem is the founder of  Position Ignition  â€" a careers company dedicated to taking you to the next step in your career. Nisa is passionate about helping individuals find the right career path for them whether it involves finding a more rewarding career, making a career change, figuring out the right career plan or being creative about career directions.

Make Your Personal Brand Visible with Newsle - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Make Your Personal Brand Visible with Newsle - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career A crucial element for maintaining a personal brand is having credibility. Building credibility by sharing relevant content and managing your online reputation is a no-brainer. In fact, while you could be an exceptional expert in your field online, what good is it to your personal brand if your efforts aren’t visible to your network?  Newsle  is a free website that tracks the news about people across the web and can get you noticed. Newsle accomplishes to alert you when you, a friend, or a public figure is mentioned  online. The site monitors the web for mentions in  online newspapers, blogs, magazines, and news sites, while private information (like personal records) are off limits. When signing up, you are able to register through Facebook, LinkedIn, or with your personal email address. You then can import your contacts  from  one or both of your social profiles.  Here are the key features: Active  Newsfeed:  Once you login, the interface provides  is  a  newsfeed  of mentions,either by your friends or public figures you can follow through Newsle.  In addition, you can  further  customize your newsfeed  showing only your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connection, or types of public figures (like politicians or journalists). All-in-One Profile:  Within your profile, you can add a bio and submit your own published articles or mentions. With each mention  you receive, your prominence in the news, or “fame factor,”  rises from 0 to 100. You can also lead others to your profile with a  Newsle  widget on your website, blog, or Facebook profile. Email Alerts:  With  Newsle  checking  every major newspaper, news site, and blog for news hourly,  you can be sure that an email will be sent notifying you of  your or a friend’s mention. Pros of  Newsle Free Easy to set-up, import friends, and follow figures Actively scours and updates for news mentions and alerts you Displays your content and news about you in one place ?Great for staying in the loop with your network Able to conduct research on a person (like an interviewer or speaker) efficiently Cons of  Newsle Can access data on your Facebook profile at anytime â€" although  Newsle  will never post anything without your permission Newsle  remains in “beta mode”, meaning bugs, errors, and performance issues are still being worked on and may arise more often For building a visible and cohesive online personal brand,  Newsle  proves to be a useful tool. Joining is easy and free, and it lets you track your own online content and mentions, as well those  of your friends in one place. When your brand is only tied to your Twitter post,  Newsle  can add help add online credibility. What do you think about  Newsle? Can tracking online mentions be useful towards a personal brand? Author: Heather R.  Huhman  is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder president of  Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for organizations with products that target job seekers and/or employers. She is also the author of  Lies, Damned Lies Internships  (2011),  #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle  (2010), and writes career and recruiting advice for  numerous outlets.

Reading a Novel You Just Might Find A Surprise Role Model

Reading a Novel You Just Might Find A Surprise Role Model I must have been about ten when I discovered the Sue Barton Nurse books.   My older sister brought them home, but I was the one that devoured them.   My mother worried that they were too sophisticated for me because they had a hint of romance. But my father said not to worry as I probably didn’t understand them anyway. My dad was wrong â€" I understood every word.   I was enamored with Sue and engaged in a reading marathon until the last of the seven books was finished.   I remember feeling sad when I closed the cover on the last book â€" I wanted more.   Sue was the figment of Helen Dore Boylston’s imagination. Miss Boylston was a nurse, an adventurer, a free spirit and an author. The books may have been partly autobiographical, but whatever, she knew how to reach her audience â€" young girls in need of a role model. A Role Model in a Novel? Yes. Sue was all that I wished to beâ€" fun-loving, outspoken, attractive, and fearless. She was always getting involved in situations which had a mysterious twist that kept me captivated.   When she wasn’t trying to solve these dilemmas she would be dressing for a date with the handsome Dr. Bill.   In my eyes, she led the most exciting life, one that I would fantasize that I might have. It was so glamorous. The series begins with  Sue Barton, Student Nurse  and starts with her first day in a big metropolitan hospital where she gets lost among the pipes in the basement but is quickly rescued by a young handsome intern, Bill Barry. From that day on through all of the seven volumes, Dr. Bill is in the picture. The books were written at the height of a dire nursing shortage with hopes the stories would entice young girls to go into nursing.     I was not tempted.  I was going to college to become a journalist, maybe a writer never a nurse.   Why did I like them so much?   I was a shy young girl growing up in a little farm community who longed for a more exciting life and the books allowed me to live vicariously through Sue. I admired the way she spoke her mind and her adventurous spirit and hoped that one day, I could be that daring. My career dreams of becoming a journalist were quickly put to rest when just before I turned fourteen my Dad came home from work one day and dropped dead.   After we got over the shock, we discovered that there was only a small pension.   With my brother in medical school and my sister in nursing school, there was very little money â€" certainly not enough for me to go to Vasser, my college of choice.   Even if the money could be scraped together, my mom was adamant that I pursue a career that would make me financially independent.   She gave me three choices â€" a teacher, a secretary or a nurse, none of which had any appeal for me. I was miserable as I contemplated my future; I quickly ruled out teaching and I knew I would be a failure as a secretary based on my disastrous summer job as a receptionist at the telephone office.   Then I remembered the Sue Barton books.   She certainly had a lot of adventures and a very handsome boyfriend. Maybe becoming a nurse might not be so bad. So thanks to Sue I made one of the most important decisions of my life â€" to be a nurse.   I quickly discovered that nursing was not quite as glamorous as Sue made it out to be but I have never regretted that move.   I owe a huge debt to my fictional role model â€" Sue Barton. This guest post was authored by Lynn Dow Lynn Dow is a seasoned nurse with laugh-out-loud stories spanning 50 years in the profession. Told with  humor and compassion,  her new book  NIGHTINGALE TALES  (out  Oct. 3),  provides an unusual and highly entertaining window into the world of nursing from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Forget the job hunt. Have a baby instead.

Forget the job hunt. Have a baby instead. Heres an idea for what women should do if theyre unemployed: Have a baby. Your first reaction is probably that this is a throwback to the 1950s. But its not. This is the most up-to-date career advice youre going to get for dealing with a down-in-the-dumps job market. Heres why a stint of unemployment is a great time to have a baby: 1) The escapism that people engage in during a bad economy is pathetic. First-choice escape from reality: Grad school,which is almost always a waste of time and money. There is a huge uptick in the number of grad school applications during a recession, but grad school is a lame way to dodge a recession. In a recession, people fear theyre wasting time. And they want to continue developing skills even though they are not employed. The problem is that grad school costs money, and in most cases, it does not make you more valuable in the workforce. There are very few available jobs that require a graduate degree. And if you pay for the degree and dont use it, you start to look like a rudderless ship to employers. (Also please dont tell me you are in grad school because you love to learn. You dont need to get a degree to learn. Do it at home, after work.) Second-choice escape from reality: Travel, which is not as valuable to your personal development as holding down a job. Yes, you see new things, and try new things. But youve been doing that your whole life. The hardest thing to do in adult life is (in this order): raise kids, stay married, and hunt for a job. You can get away with not doing the first two. But everyone needs to work. So you may as well get good at doing it. Travel is a procrastination method with quickly diminishing returns. 2) For women, a baby always decreases relative earning power. This data should surprise no one; its not because women with babies dont work hard. Its because there is a basic difference between having work at the top of your mind and having baby and work at the top of your mind. You can tell me about the exceptions all night long, but the bottom line is that men and women with the same education and the same work experience earn roughly the same salary until kids enter the picture. Then women voluntarily downshift. Some downshift a lot like dropping out and some downshift just a little like turning down extra travel because of cumulative sleep deprivation. Whatever the reason, unemployment early in a career hurts women more than men. Most women will take some time out of the workforce to have children. In general, women move in and out of the workforce more often than men, which accounts, in a large part, for the long-term decreased earning power of women. Unemployment may be the only interruption for men, and, in general, men have less of a pull than women do to leave the workforce for children. I am not passing judgment here. Its just statistical fact. So if women have a child during their stint unemployed, then they lessen the hit to their earning power. 3) The biological clock trumps career aspirations. Look at the numbers and it becomes clear that women are better off having a baby than struggling to figure out what to do with their lives. Look. You have until you are 35 to have kids. After that, your eggs go downhill fast. Your chance of having a baby with compromised health increases tenfold after age 35. In order to have two kids before age 35, you need to start when youre about 30. If you are unemployed at age 27, and struggling to establish yourself, why bother? Youll establish yourself and then mess everything up by getting pregnant. Just get pregnant now, and figure out the career later. This reminds me of the advice someone gave me about losing the baby weight after my first son. People told me, wait for the second so you dont have to lose the weight twice. The same is true of careers. Figure out your professional identity after the kids, so you dont have to struggle through unemployment twice. Many people will tell me that Im a flat-out lunatic for this advice. But heres something to consider: It is so clear that women need to manage their career choices differently than men because of their biological constraints, that Harvard and Wharton accept women into MBA programs at a younger age than men. Men and women are not identical. So they need to manage kids differently, and MBAs differently and unemployment differently. So heres to a productive (and fertile) economic slump for all!

5 Income Boosting Strategies for Personal Trainer - CareerMetis.com

5 Income Boosting Strategies for Personal Trainer As a personal trainer, you have to sacrifice your time and efforts for your clients to make money. But sometimes, what you make is not enough to pay your bills and have enough for splurging on yourself.If you want to earn more as a personal trainer, here are some strategies that can help you boost your income.1. Increase your rates:evalevalIf you think that you deserve more pay from your clients, then you should ask them for more money.Don’t under-value yourself. When you increase your hourly rate, you make your money for fewer efforts.2. Create training videos: You can create training videos and sell them online. You could create an online Shopify store and sell the videos there. You could also sell the videos on Amazon, eBay and, other ecommerce platforms.As your videos become popular, you might even get some buyers that will demand for one-on-one training sessions.3. Start online training sessions: Online training sessions are now becoming popular due to their flexibility and th eir convenience. With online training session, you can take on more clients and earn more money.This is possible through video calls, emails and other online tools. 4. Partner with communities to create entry-level fitness training programs: Not everybody has the time or the money for regular fitness training sessions. You can go to country clubs, boot camps, church associations, schools, and more places and offer to take them fitness programs.evalYou charge them less than what you will charge one person, and they then multiply the total and pay you in bulk. You stand to make a lot of money this way. You might even make more money than what you usually make.eval5. Set up your own gym: Ifyou have a large clientele, you should consider setting up your own gym. When you set up your own gym, you stand to make a lot of money.Personal trainers that own their own gyms often earn more money than their peers. Yes, setting up a gym is expensive. But you don’t need to go all in at once. You can start little and buy more equipment as money rolls in. Conclusion These are five good ways of boosting your income as a personal trainer. You just need to put your thinking cap on, strategize and then act on the strategies.evalIf you work smart and do the right thing, you will boost your personal trainer salaryor even earn more than it.