 If you're not using LinkedIn effectively, then you're not getting a college internship. That's what our guest today, Justin Nguyen, is going to tell you exactly how to do. Justin's story is really inspiring. He went from zero internships as a senior to five because he used LinkedIn effectively. And what he's going to do in the episode today is walk you through the steps of how you can build an all-star LinkedIn profile and start connecting with the right people to drive high-quality college internships. Let's do it. All right, now I'm excited to welcome our guest on to the podcast for today, Justin Nguyen. Justin is the founder of Get Your Grind Up and also the host of a top iTunes podcast, Declassified College. Justin, welcome to the Engineering Career Coach podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited for this. Yeah, we're excited to have you. You're doing some really interesting stuff and we want to learn about it and we want to share it with our listeners, of course. And you know, what you do is interesting and we'll get into some of the different channels you have and kind of the people you're helping, but kind of in your own words, before we get to that point, take us through kind of your career and how you got to doing what you do today at Get Your Grind Up. Yeah, I guess my overarching mission, right, if I was to summarize it in one sentence is to really help students, college students specifically navigate the world of college. And the reason that that hits so home with me is because when I was in school, as you can see, I'm of Asian descent and like I was taught to grow up and listen to my parents and that was sort of cornerstone of my upbringing. And my parents would always say, get good grades. If you get the good grades, you go to a good school and you'll get a good job if you get the good grades in college. So I did that. And when I was in, I believe my sophomore year of college, I had a near 4.0 GPA. I joined the clubs. I did what everyone else that was older than me was telling me what to do. And I tried to apply for internships because again, that's what you're supposed to do your sophomore year. And I applied to 50 internships and I got zero callbacks, literally rejected zero times. And I was like, what the heck is going on? The kid next to me has like a 3.0 and he's getting an internship at Goldman Sachs. And I'm over here working my butt off to get a 4.0. And I'm not even getting a callback, right? I'm just getting the generic rejection email. So one thing led to another and ultimately I graduated with five internships, three at Fortune 150 companies. And throughout that time, I figured out what I like to call these cheat codes. And unless you know these sort of cheat codes, whether it's actually learning how to network, how to reach out to individuals, all these different sort of things, college can be a really tough time. And I wanted to really help out the college student that might not necessarily know about these ins and outs of college, especially those first generation and immigrant students that are coming over to the U.S. Yeah, it's really inspiring. And I think when you have a mission like that, it kind of can really drive you in terms of what you're doing. And I think it certainly shows in the work that you do. And it's great. I mean, it's great when someone has an experience like you had with the internships and then you're able to learn from it and try to help other people. I mean, that's kind of like what we do at EMI based on my my engineering career. And I do really like the cheat code theme on your podcast, which is having people come on and talk through some kind of I don't want to call them shortcuts. But like, you know, there's there's multiple ways to do something. And what you've discovered, obviously, is one way works and other ways don't work. And you try to, you know, bring to light what works. And the cheat codes is great. And the the logo of the podcast has little Nintendo controller, which is great. I mean, when I was a kid and my brothers and I, we played all the time. In fact, for those of you and some of you, if you're younger, you're probably more to the Xbox and stuff like that. But Nintendo did have all these crazy kind of cheat codes. And I remember like actually a couple months ago, I was sitting just sitting in my kitchen during this quarantine and I sent a message to one of my best friends, a text message. And I just sent the message up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, a select star, which if you play Nintendo at all, you know that that was like the Contra cheat code that gave you like 30 guys and started you ahead of the game. But it's just a really good theme in terms of thinking through your career and how you can do things. Maybe you're spending too much energy on something that's not going to get your results. So let's talk a little bit about that. The podcast is entitled Declassified College and you've had some really impressive guests on the show before for sure. So just talk a little bit about the podcast and kind of how you decided to build it the way you've built it and how you've been kind of hosting and running it. Yeah, so the original premise of Get Your Grind Up was it was supposed to be student advice by students, but clearly I've graduated. I graduated in 2018, so I couldn't necessarily keep that same sort of mission with the Declassified College podcast. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to create basically a platform that crowdsource career information. So not just getting it from just one source, you're getting it from multiple students that are in the weeds that are working through the college system right now, as well as for our sections called a career in, you get to hear from professionals that are again in the space right then and there rather than someone who might have been retired for 10 plus or years or so. So the whole concept behind it is you're getting real life information that didn't work two, three, five years ago. It worked a couple of months ago. Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm looking at I listened to a few of Justin's episodes, and I'm just going to read off a couple of titles here just to get a feel for it. You know, had a network with alumni, which was a student perspective episode, had to pay off $100,000 of student debt, which is, I think, something that all, you know, colleges need to think about, of course, career and financial advising. In fact, one of your recent episodes, the Awaken Your Corporate Sleeper Cells episode, I know you even had someone on there who had worked at ESPN talk a little bit about networking and, you know, some cheat codes or networking effectively, which is also a really big thing in terms of getting internships, like talked about earlier. And one of the interesting kind of pieces of advice on that episode was that, you know, if you're going to reach out to someone and ask for 15, 30 minutes of their time, you should spend 15, 30 minutes, right? Like looking into them and making an appealing, you know, request, so to speak. And I think that's valuable advice, especially with the whole internship thing. I mean, if you're applying for 10 different internships, in my opinion, you should have 10 different resumes and 10 different cover letters that are really catered to that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the whole internship process. You talked about it for yourself, how it was kind of frustrating. What are some thoughts around it that you can share with our listeners? Yeah, for me, I think I only got one internship through actually applying through the traditional sense. Everything else came through meeting someone in some way, shape, or form. And that ultimately turned into an internship conversation. So for instance, my first ever internship was with Northwestern Mutual. And the only way that I got it, I believe I applied to the internship, like regularly, and I didn't get it. But I met up with a friend of mine who I played soccer with back in high school, and he just happened to be the college unit director, which I didn't know at the time. I was just like, hey, I saw that you interned at Northwestern Mutual previously, want to grab some ice cream and let's meet up and talk about your experience. So we met up for some ice cream, and one thing led to another, and he's like, hey, it actually turns out that he was the number one intern in all of the northeast. And that's what allowed him to get to become the college unit director. And then he's like, do you want an internship? And I was like, yeah, I would love one. And I didn't have to apply. He was like, we just have to set up one meeting just for formalities, basically. And you just have to pass the test, and then you're in. And I was like, oh my God, this is how sort of it works. And when you start to do a little bit more research when it comes to hiring, especially entry-level roles, a lot of it comes down to referrals. And the reason for that is for our recent episode that just released today is about product management. And one of the guys that we have on, to talk about it, Philip, he is a PM at Microsoft, and he talks about when most of the times for these PM roles, there's 5,000 applicants, and they only choose about 10 to 50 students for those jobs. So you're looking at less than a 1% acceptance rate. And the only way to actually get through the noise is to find a referral for the most part. Yeah, really interesting, and really kind of the takeaway there for me, and hopefully for our listeners is, networking is critical, and building your network is critical, and I know a lot of times in the engineering world and the technical world, sometimes people tell you, you don't have to worry about networking when you're young, wait till you're older, focus on the technical work right now, and learning your technical craft, which is, I completely disagree with that. I mean, obviously, just from what Justin just said, networking, meeting people opens up tons of doors for you, even in college. I mean, that's how he got his internships mostly from. So to that end, I wanna kind of switch this conversation and really focus on networking. We're gonna talk about LinkedIn a lot, and Justin has a course that we're gonna talk about too a little bit, because I'm a big believer in LinkedIn, a big believer in networking. I think for today's college student too, right? Like networking in person, to me, can be very uncomfortable for people, of course, especially college students, where you don't have the people skills yet, and you're trying to develop some of those, and I know, in today's world, we're even more screen heavy, right? My daughter is like, you know, I don't know how she's gonna learn how to talk to people, because they do a lot of screen time and stuff like that. And so, learning those skills can take time, but what you can do is you can use LinkedIn, which is a wonderful tool for doing that. And it's obvious, Justin, on all your stuff out there, which we're gonna share with our audience, that you have a lot of experience on LinkedIn that our listeners can benefit from. And for somebody that maybe doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, they wanna kind of really like, have a very basic profile that they wanna bump it up. Talk a little bit about how they can improve their profile and kind of move towards that all-star rating on LinkedIn. You know, kind of like one step at a time here, maybe some foundational strategies that they can take. Definitely, so sort of, I'll lay out what you need to get to an all-star rated profile first, and then we can dive into each one separately. So the seven things that you need to have an all-star rated profile on LinkedIn are your profile picture and your background photo, a headline, your complete summary, which is also called like an about section, your current position in any previous work experience, you need to add, I believe, 10 or 20 skills, your education, and then at least 50 connections. So just going off of the first one, profile picture and background photo. You don't necessarily need to overthink these, it really depends on your industry. So just for your audience being mainly engineers, I would say you can probably get away with the business casual look. You don't necessarily need the suit and tie unless you want to get into like investment banking or consulting or one of those older industries like that. And then when it comes to your background photo, again, you want to portray your personal brand here in some way, shape, or form. Maybe if you want to go work in a city, that can be a city skyline in the back. And then you can list a few of your key skills that you kind of want people to know you for. But the whole reason that you want to portray this personal brand on your LinkedIn profile is you want to think of it as a landing page whereas if I'm a recruiter or I'm a hiring manager and I land on your profile, the first two things that I'm probably going to see just aesthetically are your profile picture and your background photo. And you want to make that be able to show the recruiter what exactly they're getting themselves into when they want to talk to you. So again, skills, jobs that you're looking for, or anything like that. So for profile pictures and background, that's what I would say is the most important to do. I just want to add in there a couple of things on the profile photo in the background, just from getting a lot of questions from engineers. First of all, you don't have to go to a photographer, professional photographer for your profile photo. Put, like Justin said, business casual, have girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, whatever, take a picture of you with an iPhone and use it with a nice college shirt on or something along those lines. That's good enough for where you're at. And in terms of if you're a working engineer, because I know we have a lot of listeners who are out in their careers and out in their jobs, the background, first of all, your company may have a background. I know a lot of engineering companies can give you a background that they want all their employees to have. Fine, if they don't, just think about, again, like representing yourself and in your career and branding for yourself. I mean, I have a simple black and white background with a quote on it in white with our EMI logo, which took not long for us to make. All of us at the company use them on the background. I think it looks really clean and really sharp. Those are just some tips for working engineers, but if you're a student, don't think you can't put up a profile photo because you have to get this amazingly good professional studio photo. Get something up there, because what I found is if you don't have a photo, not only will you not get the All Star rating, but there's not that same connection. Like if a recruiter or something comes to your profile and they want to see the student that we're interested in hiring and they can't see your face. It's kind of a lack of connection. So just some of my own pointers from some experiences on the profile photo stuff. Yeah, 100%. And then like you said, you can literally take a picture with your iPhone, just make sure you have pretty good lighting, whether it's natural light or even just taking the flash of someone else's phone and just like hanging it up and then pointing it towards you. That'll make all the difference when it comes to your profile picture. So I think we hit pretty much everything for in terms of aesthetically what your profile needs. Moving on to the next one, which is headline. This is probably the second most important thing on your profile. And the reason for that is because not only is this on your profile, but when you're out there engaging with content or creating content on LinkedIn, this is what pops up next to your profile picture and then your name. So your headline is sort of where most students will put like student at X University or professionals will put a software engineer at Facebook or Google wherever you work. Yes, you kind of want that for the SEO purpose, but you also want to front load that something that is interesting and what you do to help a company out. So let's say you are an engineer and you help speed up the, let's say you're a web developer, right? And you help websites load 250% quicker than most other websites. That's something that you want to put at the front end so that it's something interesting. And then the back end, you want more SEO focused stuff. So like keywords. So, and people always ask, where can I find the right keywords to put onto my profile? Whether it's on your headline or your summary and a good way to figure out what those keywords are is figure, find like five different job descriptions for that one job that you want to get. Upload them up to jobscan.co and then Jobscan will then rank how many times a specific keyword pops up on those job descriptions and then pick sort of like the top five and find ways to implement that throughout your headline and your summary. No, that's great. So that's a real practical way to kind of figure out what some of those words are because I know that that can be difficult to do. So basically, Justin, in the beginning of your headline, you want to make something attractive and interesting that someone sees it, maybe like eye-catching. And then towards the end is where you want to put some of those SEO words that you can discover online to help you get found kind of through the search. Exactly, yeah. So you want that first, I think I believe you have 120 characters, but a little cheat code here is I believe if you edit your headline on mobile, you actually get 160 characters. So if you need a little extra space, use mobile to add a little bit more. So that, but that first section, you want that to be like a hook, right? Like a newspaper headline or anything like that to grab someone's attention. And then the back end, you want that to be more strategic in terms of what positions you're looking for or what position that you're in so that in the LinkedIn search, you're popping up higher compared to your peers. That's great. And for those of you working engineers out there, because I see this often, your headline on LinkedIn does not just have to be your work title at work on your business card. A lot of people just take their business card or whatever their title is and they put it on their project manager or whatever the case may be. And I think you can certainly use that at some point in the headline, like Justin was saying maybe at the end, but I think having something interesting in the front end is really important, especially if you're someone who's, obviously if you're trying to get a job, which is a lot of what Justin helps people do, but also maybe you're an engineer out there trying to get new clients for your company, right? So you want to cater that headline to them so it can kind of work for whatever stage you're at in your career. Just think about who you're trying to kind of attract to your profile and gear the beginning of that headline to them. All right, Justin, what's next? Summary or? Yeah, so the next one is your summary. Now, this is where a lot of people will put like their accomplishments and will basically reiterate their resume. And that's what I try to say is the opposite of what you actually want to do. Yes, you want to put some accomplishments that showcase the skills that you have, but you want to make sure that your summary has those SEO properties to it. So making sure that you know what those keywords are so that you're properly putting it into your summary. But also, this is your place to make the recruiter or hiring manager fall in love with you. And what I mean by that is really showcasing your story to be able to connect with that recruiter on the other side. You never know if that recruiter that's looking at your profile is also an immigrant or maybe they're also from Connecticut or they may love soccer just like you do. So you want to be able to find different places to pee into your story for your summary just because that's how you differentiate yourself. And we'll talk about where you can put your resume points later on in your LinkedIn profile. So that's why you don't want to reiterate it twice because put yourself in the recruiter's shoes. If you're reading something twice, you're just going to jump off the profile. Right, because I agree. I see engineers all the time, they put kind of like a summary statement of what they do in their about. And what I try to tell people is think about it this way. If someone lands on your LinkedIn page, imagine that they just read the about summary and they're going to go away, right? How do you make it so that they're interested? They maybe want to connect with you. There's a call to action. So I think that's one way to approach it potentially. Yeah, exactly. And that call to action like you just said is what a lot of people forget about, right? They'll put some accomplishments or they'll put maybe some things that they've done in school or at their job, but they won't say at the end what they want that end person to do. Whether again, it's connecting with them, reaching out to them, sending them an email, whatever it may be. A lot of people, because they don't come from a marketing or sales background, they don't think that they need to add that. And it's just something that's self-explanatory. But just by adding that can increase the amount of DMs that you get on LinkedIn or connection requests. Awesome. All right, what's next on the profile? So next is the current position in your previous work experience. So this one is pretty self-explanatory, but if you're struggling to figure out what you wanna put here, just base, you can copy and paste your resume information and put it here. So there's really, this is sort of where LinkedIn becomes your resume, essentially. But the unique part about here is if you have any links to websites, personal websites or any projects or pictures of projects that you've done, this is a great place to feature it on your LinkedIn profile. And that's something that's completely different than a resume because a resume is just a piece of paper. You can't really link anything there. Whereas LinkedIn, you have sort of a visual perspective that you can add those elements to it. Awesome. So this is where you're getting into the resume stuff because like you said, a lot of people start that too early up in the summary and the about, but it's better off to be more, to try to pulling people in up there, telling a story, getting them interested. And then you get to the resume when you're listing out your different experiences. Exactly, because most of the time if a recruiter is landing on your profile, it's probably because they saw your resume and you linked your LinkedIn on your resume or they just looked up your name from your resume. So they already know that information. That's why you didn't want to reiterate that in your summary. You can put it down sort of later in your profile. So if they get that far, then they're pretty invested in you and they wanna see something a little bit different and that's where the links kind of come into play. Perfect, all right. So that gets you down to your profile. And then where do you go from there? Next one is skills. This is a part where a lot of people kind of forget about. You get 50 skills to add on there and people are like, well, what skills do I put? Again, this is where you go back to jobscan.co and you look at all those keywords. All of those keywords are most likely skills. And if there is skill, then you go to your skills section and then you add that skill to your profile and you try to get individuals to add your skills, like endorse your skills. I believe that's what it's called. So the easy way to kind of get endorsements on your skills is you don't necessarily wanna just go out all over the place and say like, hey, Anthony, like, hey, give me some endorsements for my skills. That's like the worst thing that you wanna do, right? You want to do it from more of a perspective of poking, like on Facebook. So I'm not sure if you remember how like Facebook used to have the poke feature, right? So what people used to do back in the day was like you would poke your friends and it would just be sort of like something that you would do back and forth to each other to annoy each other at that point. But you can do something very similar on LinkedIn where you reach out to someone, you go to someone's profile and you endorse them for their skills and then you send them a quick note just saying, hey, Anthony, just went to your profile and saw and endorsed you for these three skills that we worked on together at a previous job or in school for a project or something like that. And then just leave it at that. Most of the time they'll go to your profile and they'll reciprocate it because they just wanna be a nice person. So that's a little hack, little cheat code that you can do when it comes to trying to get more endorsements for your skills. That's awesome. And what I like about the endorsements is that it is kind of for the most part like a third party endorsement, right? So it's not like, you know, it's something that people say, all right, other people, a lot of other people, I think if you get to like the 99, if you get over 99, it says like 99 plus. So then they're saying, all right, a lot of people endorsed, you know, Justin or Anthony for this. So they must be really good at and also it's telling LinkedIn that as well, right? So when people search for certain skills, if you've been endorsed by a lot of people, it's gonna help for you in terms of getting found in those types of searches. Exactly, yeah, it's a huge SEO boost. If you can get multiple people to endorse you. I mean, if you can get to that 99 plus level, then it's phenomenal whenever a recruiter looks up a specific skill, especially if you're a student. Yeah, for sure. All right, what's next, Justin? So the last two, I'll go over them very, very quickly. So education, just putting your school and the reason that you wanna do that is so that you can use the alumni tool, whether you're a recent grad, a student or you're 10, 20 years into your profession, the alumni tool is very influential when it comes to trying to find individuals when you're like trying to switch careers or change industries or anything like that. That's a unique way to build your network. And you can't, I don't believe you have access to the alumni tool unless you put what school that you graduated from or you're currently attending. And then the last one is to have at least 50 connections. I would say that's like bare minimum. I would say aim for 500. And the reason that you wanna aim for 500, and I know that might seem like a lot, but once you start adding people, especially using like the alumni tool and things like that, 500 comes pretty quickly. But the reason I say that is on your profile, if you have less than 500, it tells you the specific number of connections that someone has. So you have like 357 or 232, right? But if you have over 500, your number just says 500 plus. So whether you have 501 or whether you have 10,000 it just says 500 plus. So that's why you wanna reach 500 just to sort of have that last bit of certification on your profile. Yeah, for sure. I think that looks really good when you're 500 plus. I mean, I know when I'm looking at someone and I see the 500 plus, I'm thinking that they're kind of like a power user. They use LinkedIn a lot. And I do think that one, well, I know sometimes engineers can struggle with starting to build connections and stuff. But one thing I can tell you is if you go to the My Network tab on LinkedIn, there's a way that you could put your email address in there and you can allow LinkedIn to go through your like Gmail contacts or whatever it is and they'll send an invitation to everybody in your email contact database that has a LinkedIn account. And so that's kind of a quick way that can get you out of the gate on getting like 100 or a couple of hundred connections depending on how big your address book is. And really theoretically, they know you already if they're in your email book. So they should just be a simple accepting of your connection. So that's something that's kind of an important way to get out of the gate there. And I recommend that if you're new to LinkedIn and you're trying to build up, you're trying to really build it up. So we went through the seven kind of areas that you need to focus on to get to that quote, unquote all star LinkedIn profile, recap it real quickly. We talked about your profile photos and your background image, making them clean, simple, nothing too crazy or elaborate, but have something there that looks sharp. We talked about your headline, putting something catchy and interesting at the beginning of the headline and then putting kind of more of the SEO words and your title at the end of it. The about page or the about summary on your page that kind of you should talk a little bit about, make it interesting, maybe a story or something that pulls people in with a call to action. Then we get into your experience which is really kind of your resume on your profile, your skills which can help LinkedIn, probably most importantly, identify what you're good at and get you positioned in the right searches. And then your education that you can get in there and your contacts getting up those connections. But the one point I wanna go back to real quick on the education part of it is, and this is kind of like where I think a lot of people miss out on LinkedIn, a lot of engineers will put their company name in that they work for there, but they're not actually linking to their company's profile, which is the same as I think what you're referencing and you know, you'd link to your school specifically, right? And so, you know, making those connections is important because like Justin said, for like alumni purposes when we're talking about your school and when you're talking about your company, I mean, it looks good when your actual company profile is on your profile and someone could click on the company profile, takes them to the company page about the company and they see about the company. And I see like CEOs and presidents of big companies that just type in their company name and it's like great out and it's not the actual company page. So that's something that I really think that you need to, you know, focus on. So that's something that's important. Justin, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was creating content, right? So one of the things that, you know, I'm sure people are thinking like, okay, I'm gonna do this LinkedIn thing, I'm gonna ramp up my profile and then I'm gonna have to kind of put stuff out there, right, because I'm on LinkedIn. So what recommendations do you have for, you know, when maybe you have some tips specifically for college students and then maybe also just in general in terms of what kind of content can people put out there? Yeah, definitely. So I think especially for anyone that's coming from a technical background, they might look at content and be like, well, what content can I create, right? For a marketing student it might be easy or for a finance person it might be easy but I would also say for any, let's just say like a CS engineering student, right? You can maybe talk about the web app that you're developing on the side and just documenting that journey and that content in of itself because what you wanna do with your content is you wanna showcase your skills and the reason for that is the sort of the LinkedIn funnel like what I like to call it is you wanna connect with the recruiting, the recruiters or the hiring managers from the companies that you wanna work for and then so they're in your ecosystem and then you create content that showcases your skills because especially when you're coming from a student perspective and even in like 10 or 20 years in your profession the riskiest thing from an employer standpoint is is this person lying on their resume and the best way to overcome that sort of stereotype is to show that you actually can do these skills. So that's how you can use content of whether it's a side project that you're working on or let's say you're an aerospace engineer and you wanna talk about your thoughts on the latest SpaceX launch, certain things like that that showcases your expertise in a specific niche and that's how when you connect with these hiring managers or recruiters you can then send them that article that you wrote or that video that you created, whatever it may be and say, hey, I just wrote up this article about the latest SpaceX launch. I would love for you to take a look at it and give me any feedback that you have and you send that to the hiring manager at SpaceX and like, oh my God, this guy's actually he really knows what he's talking about. I would love to have a conversation with him and who knows what that turns into. So that's sort of how you can use LinkedIn in general but also when it comes to creating content to bridge that relationship with recruiters and hiring managers. Yeah, that's really helpful and one of the things that I'll kind of kick in here too just from my own experiences to kind of visualize it, you can think about it this way in terms of sharing stuff on LinkedIn, think about it if you had like a physical briefcase and you had different folders in it and you were bringing it on an interview, let's just say one folder might be like your work, right? So like Justin was saying if you worked on a specific project or maybe like a senior engineering project you have a couple posts about that. Maybe another folder is like, things you're reading, right? So if you read like a really great article on one thing or the other, you post that article you share with your group and you kind of have the folder of all the stuff that you read and how you do personal development type of stuff. Maybe you have another folder that's like some quotes that you find to be really helpful and you post them out on a regular basis, right? So you have like a mix of things like you wanna put stuff up about yourself but you also wanna post some valuable information out there that other people could benefit from and I think that's how you build strong connections. So don't kind of get too overwhelmed by it. I think starting, try a couple posts a week and you might find that it gets easier and then you can see how often you wanna do it. But I read some stats on LinkedIn recently and it was something crazy. Like if you post one day, like once a week you're in like such small percentage of people on LinkedIn because so many people- Oh yeah, you're in the top 1%. Yeah, it's like top 1% because so many people have LinkedIn and they don't do anything. They're not active on it at all. So it's not that hard to kind of get out there and become like a top LinkedIn user actually. And if you follow, of course, the stuff that Justin ran through, you'll kind of be way ahead of the game. So I hope that that was helpful. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna take just a short break and then we're gonna come back with Justin and do our Take Action Today segment. I wanna have him talk a little bit about his really popular LinkedIn course, Accelerate Your Career with LinkedIn that can help you do some of the things we just talked about and he's gonna give us kind of one piece of advice that he can leave us with so you could take it and kind of run with it. So stick around, we'll be back in a minute. All right, we're back with Justin Wynn, founder of Get Your Grind Up and also host of the top podcast, Declassified College and we've been talking a lot about the importance of networking, which is important. Justin does a lot of stuff around college students and helping them get jobs and get internships. You know, we also help engineers and technical professionals and it's just as important for them to network throughout their career, right? So networking is this thing that's always gonna be helpful for you and we focused on that a lot. Now, Justin, you walk through kind of those seven aspects of building an all-star LinkedIn profile which was really clear and really laid out. That being said, you have a very popular LinkedIn course called Accelerate Your Career with LinkedIn where you really help people do exactly kind of what you walk through. Talk about, you know, what made you create the course and how you came up with that. Yeah, so the reasoning for me wanting to create this course is because I started to create this content online about like careers and student journeys and I saw that so many students had problems getting internships and jobs. And when I looked at the numbers, it was like 85% of jobs are filled with referrals. So I was like, well, I've figured out this way to use LinkedIn. Let me be able to share this to other students as well as professionals too because this knowledge isn't just limited to college students. So I partnered up with my good friend, Stan Miller, who runs his own executive coaching called StoryKate, where he helps executives master their story. And they've gotten numerous amounts of promotions and found new careers from his coaching. So we partnered up on this to really help people understand A, how to use LinkedIn, the basics, as well as going over some key secrets of like my formula when I message individuals how to actually use LinkedIn search to find key people in key places to help you bridge these gaps to find these careers. So all in all, the course, it's only one hour, right? We have 15 video messages in that one hour long course and it comes with a 24 page workbook, but you're gonna be able to turn your LinkedIn profile not only to an all star, but you'll become a master of LinkedIn when it comes to your profile as well as engaging and creating content on there. That's awesome because, you know, no one wants to go through these courses that are like hours and hours, right, anymore. No one has the attention span for that. So, you know, that's a quick way where you can really, you know, build your LinkedIn skills and beyond just what Justin went over in the podcast, but like he said, some of those messaging, those are like important things because if you're gonna reach out to people, you wanna kinda really nail it. And so again, the courses accelerate your career with LinkedIn, we're going to, I don't know if you have a simple URL for it, Justin, or we can just link to it in the show notes. Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes, but if you go to getyourgrindout.com, G-E-T-C-H-O-G-R-I-N-D-U-P.com, there's a little tab called LinkedIn Course, and you can just click that and that should bring you to our page as well. Awesome, awesome. All right, Justin, so one last thing here while we have you, you know, we went through LinkedIn, you talked about the importance of networking. So, you know, someone just listened to the podcast and maybe they're like a beginning LinkedIn user, they have a profile, they don't use it a lot. And they're gonna, you know, they just listened and they wanna go start today. What's like, give them like an easy first step that they can take. Yeah, so let's say you've listened to the podcast, hopefully you like what I said and you started to execute on a little bit of it in terms of changing your profile for the most part. Now comes the interesting part of you've built a great profile, how do you get people to it? And that's where I want you to sit down, right? Figure out 10 companies that you really wanna work for or get a job at, and then you're gonna find 10 or 15 people from each of those companies, create an Excel sheet. From that Excel sheet, that's when you reach out to individuals on LinkedIn and that's how you can start conversations. Because I think the hardest part when it comes to LinkedIn is people will create a great profile and they just kind of expect that jobs will come to them. When in reality, especially at the beginning, you have to bring people to your own page and this is a great way to kind of get started with it all and get tested with like reaching out, trying different tactics and getting in touch and on phone calls with some of these key influential people. Awesome, so there you have it. You've got a recipe to make your LinkedIn profile an all-star profile. You've got a way that you can start sending people or attracting people to your profile and you can get Justin's course and you can get even more details around how to message and interact with people which we've been talking about as networking and being one of the kind of fundamental aspects of your career from launching it all the way through kind of to the end of your career networking is super important. So once again, Justin Nguyen, founder of Get Your Grind Up and host of the podcast entitled Declassified College. Thank you for spending some time on us on the Engineering Career Coach podcast. Thank you for having me on. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave your comments and your questions in the comments section below this video. Also, if you'd like to view the full show notes for this episode, visit engineeringmanagementinstitute.org or see the link in the video description. There you will find the key points discussed in today's episode as well as links to any of the resources, websites, or books mentioned during the episode. Until next time, I wish you the best in all of your Engineering Career endeavors.