 Are you looking for your ideal job in IT? I'm Jonathan Pollinger and in this video, I'm going to give you five tips on how to land your perfect job in IT. Let's get into it. So the first thing you can do is to optimize your profile. So with your profile, there's a number of things that you can do to enhance the prospect of people finding you. And there are in fact some specific job features on your profile. So let's talk about those first. So first of all is open to work. So you've got this section open to work here. And if I click on this, you can see that I've got this set up for job titles that I'm interested in, location types, locations, start date and employment types. So if you're looking for IT roles, then clearly you want to specify these fields accordingly, but pretty handy. And this helps you to show up in searches when recruiters or agencies are searching for IT professionals and also cause lipids on your profile. So if somebody finds your profile, then they can see that you are open to work. You'll also notice that there is a flash here on my profile picture that says that I'm open to work. So I'm just going to point out a few other key features with your profile. For more information on optimizing your profile, check the link on the top right hand side of this video right now. And there's a full video on optimizing your profile there, but just a few key features with regard to job search. So profile picture and cover picture is important. So you want to present the right image here of an IT professional in the cover space here and the profile image here. Headline is important. So this is significant in terms of discovery and search. So you want to make sure here that you are using keywords and you're clearly explaining the area of IT that you work in. And you might even want to say that you are currently looking for a position because again that phrase will show up in searches so that recruiters and agencies can find you. You want to make sure that your contact info is on here and all filled out. So anybody interested in recruiting you can get in touch. Particularly important is this one here, the email. So a lot of people log in with their personal email, but do make sure that your primary email is your work email and that that is displayed there. Then there's an extra link that you can put in here if you've got curator mode. Now everybody's going to have curator mode by default soon, but it is worth putting in this extra link here. And perhaps that could point to a blog that you have or a website or your CV or anything else that is relevant. And to add that link if you click on the edit pencil symbol here scroll down to the bottom you'll see that there's custom button go to edit custom button and you can add that there. Other points on your profile if we scroll down here are the feature section so you might want to highlight particular content that is relevant going to come on to sharing key content later in this in this video. And a couple of other sections that I wanted to mention our experience obviously make sure that that is up to date in terms of your roles to show that you have got the necessary experience to land your next IT job. Then we want to look at skills which we're getting into here so make sure that you've got the relevant skills listed and even more important than that is recommendations. So recommendations I think they provide a higher currency, they're better value than the skills because people actually have to write from a blank sheet of paper and acknowledge that you are good at what you're doing. So and they're also very authentic as well because they're tied in with somebody's name and profile picture as we can see. So do ask people for recommendations. So there's a few pointers there in terms of how to optimize your profile for job search. So tip number two is to create relevant content. So the actual act of posting content is relatively straightforward. You can go to the home page as you can see here on LinkedIn, click in the start post box and just literally start typing here and if you want to add photos you can do that by clicking on add media. Also worth noting that you can add PDFs which could be handy if you wanted to add your CV for example or any sort of research any sort of like white papers or technical documents perhaps that you wanted to share on LinkedIn. So it's important to create relevant articles, relevant posts, creating videos related to any sort of IT topics that you're passionate about. This will demonstrate your knowledge and interest in IT and when people start to engage with your content then that will give you an opportunity to engage with them. That will help the algorithm kick in and you'll become more visible across the LinkedIn network. So a few ideas maybe if you sort of like trend sort of topics that you could talk about. So things like cyber security, AI is very popular at the moment, cloud computing is another one and particularly if you've got your own point of view around these topics that can really really help. Finally how about creating a video CV so this can really make you stand out from the crowd because probably about 95% of CVs are Word or PDF documents so why not take the time to create a video which you can upload on LinkedIn and as in the previous tip tip number one you can actually feature that on your profile and tell the story tell the story of why you're looking for a job why you're looking to improve your career. If you've got any situation where you've kind of overcome adversity, solved a problem, anything like that where you can really sort of like tell a story in terms of how you've turned the situation around that will stand you in really good stead but overall just just make it really sort of like personal and this will help you come across nicely in the video and help you stand out amongst other potential candidates. So there you go a few ideas on creating content on LinkedIn. So tip number three I'm going to show you how to grow your network on LinkedIn to improve your chances of getting a decent career in IT. So the reason for increasing your network on LinkedIn is twofold so first of all it increases your visibility increases the visibility of your posts and any articles that you publish because a wider body of people can now see them. Secondly your direct connections are able to communicate with you and more importantly you're able to communicate with them so you can reach out to them and ask them about potential vacancies in IT but first of all you need to find somebody to connect with. This might be through a second or perhaps third connection that is liked or commented on something and they appear in your news feed. Secondly you could use the search so let's give a demonstration of that. So if I search for IT manager here I'm going to get a number of different results. It's people that we're interested in so let's select the people button at the top here and that gives us a number of filters at the top that will help us narrow down these results from 3.6 million here. So let's click on location and suggest that I'm going to work in Bristol so I'm going to narrow that down here to 3,600 results. It's a good idea to display second connections so that way there will be a mutual connection so you will both know a particular person that you can perhaps reference when you get in touch to connect with the people on this list. So that brings us down to more manageable 1,100 people here so I'm just going to select Liam Roberts here and then I could follow but we want to connect and then I can personalize the invitation so I'm going to click on add a note and write a personalized note there off to Liam pointing out perhaps that I am looking for a job in IT and that's pretty much it. You'll notice that we are now limited to 5 on some people limited to 10 invitations per month but you can send out any number of connection requests without the note and after that you are able to communicate. So I would suggest connecting with fellow IT professionals, recruiters, agencies, personalize your connection request explaining why you are connecting pointing out that you're looking for a new role in IT and whilst you're at it and perhaps even before you connect make sure that you engage with their content by liking commenting and perhaps sharing it too and wider than that go for companies as well build your network in that way so make sure that you follow companies and engage with their content if you're interested in working with them so a few ideas there on how to grow your network on LinkedIn. So tip number four builds on growing your network which we covered in the previous tip so this involves going back to your old college or older university and potentially contacting people there so let's demonstrate that one so if we look for Cardiff University which is where I went to university we can click on the page here and handily there is an alumni section here so if we go to alumni we can then actually search all the alumni here over any time period I'm going to leave it for this full time period here but I could actually narrow that down to when I was at university and potentially come across people that I remember but I'm going to leave it open to that whole time period there and I'm just going to search for IT so I could put in information technology but just going to search for IT here and you'll see that I get a number of options people that are working in IT or at least do have the word IT in their profile so I could reach out to these people as explained before engaging with their content and then connecting with them explaining that we went to the same university and explaining that I am looking for IT work so quite a niche one there but perhaps worth pursuing to give you that extra opportunity of finding a decent career in IT so the fifth and final tip relates to the specific jobs features that LinkedIn have that help you find a better job in IT so we need to go to the job section here the jobs icon on the top menu bar so if we click on that we get into the jobs area here and you'll see on the left that there are a number of options here that are quite handy so you can set application settings you can get some look at some videos for guidance on finding jobs even build your CV or your resume based on your LinkedIn profile some interview preparation materials there you can demonstrate your skills by taking courses you can set preferences for job search and this is where your saved job so any job that comes up in the search you can save and it appears in this area and that's really the the key sort of feature the database of jobs that you can search so let's demonstrate that so if we search for information technology specialist for example we have a whole bunch of jobs here that that show up and I've got a previous filter here set a director level so I can take that off and you'll see that more jobs will be made available here so if it was these kind of like jobs that I was looking for I can set an alert here and that will handily notify me when any new vacancies become available which is pretty useful because that saves me having to to go back and manually input an additional search there so LinkedIn jobs area lots of features specifically for job seekers there is the job search that's available in the main search area but I'd advise you to go into this area because you've got more filters and other useful job features that help you find your ideal job so that's it how to improve your career or find a new job in it now that you've watched those tips you should be in a good position to land that perfect job in it for more tips like and subscribe to the NILC YouTube channel see you again next time