 All right, hello and good evening everyone. Thanks so much for joining me. My name is Jill Cleese and I am the iSchool Career Center Liaison. And as your Career Center Liaison, I am available to all of you via email, through phone, and even video chat if that works for you to answer all of your career related questions. My workshops, the career workshops, are intended to be informal with a Q and A format. So absolutely feel free to type your questions in the chat box. Let's keep this interactive. And I want to make sure that I give you a forum to get the information you need. So really do feel free to ask me your questions. How many of you have visited the Career Development site before? Just go ahead with a show of hands. All right, about half of you, a little more than half. Excellent. So for those of you who have not been here yet, I highly encourage you to put this on your list of things to do, things you want to check out. Just know where the Career Development site is and some of the information that's available to you. You can find it right off of the main webpage for the iSchool. You've got the Career Development tab right at the top. And then all of the sections that are in the green box, those are all the different sections we have. And of course those open up and there's more information in there. So there's a lot of good stuff. This is always a great place to start. If you can't find what you need, then by all means feel free to contact me. And I'm definitely here to help. So here we go. Tonight, we are talking about how to develop your online brand. I'm specifically going to be focusing that mainly on LinkedIn because that's a professional site versus personal, so it's all going to be related to work. But typically in terms of developing your brand, you could think of that in more global terms if you want to. But let's first address the question of what is your brand? So what do you think about when you think of your brand? These are some of the things that I think about. If you have something different, type it in the chat box. I'd be curious to know what you think. But oftentimes when people ask me about LinkedIn or they're not sure what to put, I usually say, usually it's the top two messages, frankly. I'm always thinking like, well, what's the message that you want to send? And how do you want to present yourself to the world? And that usually helps people kind of put it in perspective and think about, oh, that's a good way to think about it. I wonder what I do want to put on my profile and how do I want people to view me and see me? So I do think it's all of these things. I personally tend to think of it more as those first two in terms of what is our brand. So if we're going to focus on our brand and developing it, and we hear a lot of the buzzword of that, why is it important and why is it important just to market ourselves online in the first place? So I think here's a couple of things. But really for all of you, it demonstrates to employers that you are well-versed in current internet and social media capabilities, which honestly is really important for most LIS-related jobs. So think about it. How can you say you're current in emerging technology but that you're not active online? So it's something you really want to think about. I know that using social media or using LinkedIn isn't for everyone, but it's becoming something that is so truly important to our job search and how we market ourselves that I would encourage people to really get involved and to do it. So let me check in with all of you. First of all, how many of you actually have a LinkedIn profile? So again, show of hands. So it looks like about 10, 10 out of about 18 that we have on tonight. So again, a little more than half. For those of you who don't have one, please go ahead and type in the chat box and just give me a sense of what's holding you back. Is it just that you haven't got around to doing it, you don't know how to do it, you're uncomfortable with social media, you're uncomfortable with putting yourself on LinkedIn, I'd like to get a sense of where people are coming from. So we can sort of address some of those issues before we dive into how you want to put all this together. So I see lots of people typing. People say, I don't think I have enough experience. I haven't gotten around to it because I'm still in school. Nervous that I'll make a misstep of setting it up, particularly things. Coming off is a bumpkin. That's cute. Just trying to have the time to learn about LinkedIn. Okay, reasonable. So we can take care of that. First I want to get to is it looks like jazz now. So I get having gotten around to it. Absolutely, I get that. Still in school. I think while you're in school, it's actually a really important thing to get together while you're in school. If you want to start building the profile, you want to start developing your brand. And again, I can do that with air quotes because we're like, that's that buzz word about developing your brand. But you want to start. And while you're in school, it's a great time to start because you can use being a student to your advantage when you reach out to people to make connections, when you do research on people on LinkedIn. And I'm going to show you how to do that. And then you want to reach out to them and get information from them that can help you make really good choices now while you're a student in terms of what are classes I want to take? Or what are some areas that I'm thinking of being interested in that I'd like to get some more information? Or where am I I want to do an internship? Or what's it like to work at this particular company? These are all kinds of questions that you want to ask now while you're a student and starting to have a LinkedIn profile and connecting with people through LinkedIn is a great way to connect and ask those questions. If we work in an older career as a career changer, would we identify as a student? Absolutely, Tom. That is a really great question. So you could actually use both of those angles to your benefit. So one is the older career or career changer you can use to your benefit as being a professional, having experience. You want to start to identify how your past experience can transfer over into the field that you want to go into, meaning what are the skills that you can take with you. And then you could certainly still play that student card. There's nothing wrong with doing that no matter what your age is. But the bottom line is that people are interested in talking to and helping students because we all remember what it was like to be a student, to be treading water in a new area and wanting to develop new skills and experience. So definitely still use that student card to your advantage. So Jassa says she always thought of LinkedIn as more of a job searching tool. And absolutely it's a job searching tool. I think of it more honestly as a networking tool. I think of it for me as a way to connect with people. And then I also use it as a tool to research and look at people's backgrounds, see where they're working, what are they doing, what was their path. And then I can use it for a job searching tool. And I'm going to show you how to do all that as we go through this process. Okay, so let's see, back to, I covered a lot of why it's important. Let me see if there's anything else I want to add in there. I already feel like I gave you a whole bunch of things. One thing I do want to point out though is that LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile is different than your resume. So where your resume is tailored to tailored document, right? And it's tailored towards a specific position that you are seeking at any given time. Where your online profile, overall it creates an image of you. And you can make that image of you be in a different way if you want to, different from your resume because you get to determine the image. That means you get to determine how do I represent myself in my profile? What do I choose to put in there? What are the words that I choose to use? Am I going to put in my projects? Am I going to link to different things that I've done? Do I show aspects of myself if I'm an artist? Do I want to weave that into my profile or not? So you get to make those choices. So I do think of our resume as this very tailored document, tailored towards a specific job. And I think of my LinkedIn profile as something that can show a bigger picture of who I am and what I can offer to the work world or to a particular employer. LinkedIn also connects you to opportunities that are otherwise never made available to job seekers because those jobs may never be posted on actual job boards. But because you may be connecting with people or people post a position through LinkedIn, you might have access then to find out about something that you may never have heard about in another way. Again, it also really builds your professional networks. I have, which is so funny to me, but I have, I have a way over 500 connections. And really it's just because I started making a conscious effort to connect with people I meet at conferences, people who I meet in workshops, people who are presenting on panels, people who might come to campus and I don't give a presentation about something, or I meet them one time in a networking event. And then I'm sure to go back to LinkedIn, look them up, send them a personal message like, hey, I really enjoyed meeting you the other day at such and such networking event. I would love to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. And I send the message off to them, nine times out of 10, people are going to connect, and now I've added them. So now I'm building my sort of database of people. So it's a very powerful tool in that way. You want to also remember that about 60 to 80 percent of the jobs that people find that people get are through networking, not just job boards or looking at job postings, but through networking, and that means social media and online networking too. So Kate says, after a semester's over, should we connect with our instructors? Or is that weird? It's actually not weird at all, and you may even connect with your instructors right now. Nothing says that you need to wait until the semester is over. I'd probably be inclined to go in and connect with them right now. Hey, I'm really enjoying your class. I would love to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Boom, and send them a message, and that's a great thing to do. So thanks for bringing that up, Kate. Let's see. The other point of why it's important too is that it makes you visible to hiring managers and to recruiters and other decision makers. So a lot of times recruiters could be hiring managers, but oftentimes it's recruiters and HR people. They can use LinkedIn to source, that's the keyword, to source or to search for qualified candidates. They have access to kind of go in the back end of LinkedIn so that they can actually put in keywords or skill words and they can search for people whose profiles are meeting that criteria. And then you may very well even get a message from recruiters via LinkedIn. It's happened to me. It's happened to other students that I've worked with who've actually received messages from recruiters. Hey, I saw your profile on LinkedIn. We're looking for someone who has your background. Would you be interested in this position? If so, give me a call. So that sounds crazy, but it happens and that's because they're sourcing and they're searching for people on LinkedIn. Okay. I'm going to keep moving on. As you have questions, feel free to continue to type them in the chat box because I'm going to keep my eye on it, so I'll be checking. So marketing yourself. We've talked about how many people have a LinkedIn profile, but I'll say a lot of times people don't really know what to do with it. So 93% of employers, as I said, use LinkedIn to source and find candidates. So that's an important piece to market yourself. I just looked this up and as of July of this year, LinkedIn has 380 million users on it. That's incredible. When you think about that many people being in one place that you actually could have access to. Statistics show that two people join LinkedIn every second and 70%, this is big, 70% of the users on LinkedIn are international. So that means if you had some idea of wanting to work in another country, this is a great tool to connect with people because the users are in over 200 different countries. I just think it's amazing. More industries are starting to use LinkedIn. Industries such as healthcare, education and nonprofits. And by that I mean LinkedIn when it first started out was much more of a high-tech tool. People in the business world were the ones using LinkedIn. But now you find people who are in healthcare or who are in education and the nonprofit sector and the government sector are actually on LinkedIn and starting to use LinkedIn. So it's permeating other industries as well. And employers, when I talk to employers, when I talk to recruiters, they recommend that you get connected on LinkedIn because that's how a lot of places will search for people, will find people. Now it's not always, when I've looked at certain people who work, say just at a public library. Not all public librarians have I seen are on LinkedIn. Younger ones are. Some of the ones who have been in the field for many, many years, I've noticed that they're not on LinkedIn. It's probably not on their radar, but younger people definitely are. People who are in public libraries, I've definitely noticed that they're on LinkedIn. And then when it starts to go from their government, they're on LinkedIn. People in special libraries, they're on LinkedIn. So I see it definitely happening more and more. So I think it's that important. Okay. So five most useful elements of your profile. Getting recommendations, we're going to talk about all these, recommendations, your summary section, which we're going to hit, education. I'm not going to talk about that because I think that's a given. We're going to have our education on there, mainly because you're all current students. Skills and expertise, we're going to talk about that. And then the experience, we're going to talk about that. So those are the five most useful LinkedIn profile elements that recruiters are going to check out. But before we dive into those, let's not forget about having a profile picture. Super, super important, don't skip it. Without a photo, you are 11 times less searchable than somebody who has a photo. But here's my word of caution. Make sure it's a professional looking headshot. It doesn't have to be a professional photo, but it's got to be professional looking. We just need a head, your headshot. Make sure though it's not a cartoon, it's not an avatar, your pet's not in it, your kids aren't in it, it's professional. That's what LinkedIn is all about. There's a question from Jazna. Do libraries tend to maintain LinkedIn pages like company pages? That's a good question. I think some of them do, no, I'm going to say I think some of them do. I'm not going to say most all of them. And that's a good thing that you could be looking into and just researching on your own. I'm thinking a lot of libraries are definitely going to have Facebook pages because they're going to hire younger or newer, not necessarily younger. I'll say more current students in to handle the social media aspect of the company. So that's where they, if they're trying to attract younger users to their library, they will probably, they could have a Twitter page. They could be on LinkedIn and they're definitely going to be on Facebook. But those are things you could definitely research and you could find out ahead of time so you kind of know how to position yourself when you're talking with somebody or you're trying to get a job there. So profile pic, make sure you have it. Headline, I'm going to show you what the headline looks like. But you want to try to create a catchy keyword rich headline. It kind of makes you stand out a little bit more. So headlines are going to look like this. These are some, these are some examples. How many of you, does anybody know Scott Brown? He's one of our adjunct faculty or I guess maybe a lecturer really. I use his picture, his profile a lot. So he's got a nice photo. I've kind of stretched it out a little bit because I made it fit on the screen. But you can see his headline, information professional, speaker, coach, researcher. I like that. So rather than just having his title, which this is probably not his work title at all, but rather just having a title, he's actually used words that represent kind of what he does and how he works. And that's what I mean when you have that kind of a catchy headline. Here's another one. Oh, and before I move on from Scott Brown, I want to give him a little plug. He is in the spring. He's having a one-unit class and it's called Marketing Your LIS Skills. And that class that he's going to teach in the spring actually ties in quite nicely to what we're talking about tonight in terms of creating your profile. And it actually ties in nicely to putting your resume together and helping you figure out what your strengths are and how they relate to potential jobs. So if that kind of strikes a chord with you of interest, think about that in the spring, his one-unit class. Okay, moving on. Here's another example. So her headline, career counselor. Here's her title where she works. But then she gets into a career strategist and a creative program manager. So she's changing it. She's adding some other things in there which make it look just a little more catchy. Now here's one that's more basic, Christina Mune. She's one of our alums. But hers just academically is on library at San Jose State University. So that's okay too. And that's the reason I wanted to put that one up because when you're just starting out or when you're a student right now, you're thinking, well, I don't know what to put in there that's so catchy. So what I want to say to you with that is that it's okay. Just keep it in mind that as time goes on, you may want to add some things to your tagline, to your headline. And you can kind of grow into your headline, which I think is a good way to think about it. It might just even evolve for you. And sometimes it evolves from feedback that you get from other people about what your natural strengths are. Those are things that you just do. And for example, I'll give you an example. My headline says, coach, online instructor, career strategist, health and wellness enthusiast. Because those are kind of all the things that I'm interested in. But I honestly kind of grew into that headline from the fact of I never really necessarily thought of myself as a coach or an online instructor. Even though that's exactly what I do, I didn't really think about it. But other people sort of pointed that out to me or they started to call me that, you know, and I would thought, huh, I guess that really is what I do. I should embrace that. And so in embracing that, I added it to my headline. And I started to use that as a little bit when I started to tailor and build my summary and my experience section. So I hope that helps you a little bit when you think about how that's going to, how you're going to grow into that. So Tom says, you know, how specific do you want to get? So it's a good question. One, it's something that you're going to want to be comfortable with. But secondly, the specificness of it is really going to be based, again, on answering that question of how do you want to present yourself to the world? How do you want to market yourself? What is the message that you want to send, right? So if I back up and I look at Anita's, for example, she could have just left it as career counselor, not as a state university. But she did go a little bit deeper because these are things that, this is how she wants to brand herself that she is a strategist, that she's creative in developing programs. So she's more than just a career counselor. And if we think about Scott, he could have just left it as information professional. But he does a lot of speaking engagements. He does have a counseling background, so he coaches students. And he does a lot of research. And he wants to make sure that that is how he brands himself to the world. So it's just something to think about. But I like the examples of people adding a little bit more to their headline. So hopefully that makes sense. Okay. So the next thing, so I'm kind of thinking of the LinkedIn profile starting at the top and working down. So you're going to have your picture. You're going to have your headline. The next section that actually looks really good on your profile is a summary section. You don't have to have a summary section. And I'll tell you what I notice on a lot of student profiles is that this section is missing. They don't add it. They go right into their experience. Like that's the first thing that shows up. And I think that that's a missed opportunity. I think having your summary section right there at the top is an excellent way for anybody to be able to summarize the best of who they are and what they have to offer in terms of the types of positions that they're interested in. It's a place for you to highlight your strengths, your areas of expertise, or your specializations. And again, you can summarize those key areas that make you unique and demonstrate how you can add value to an organization. So this one is just the example that was taken from Scott Brown's profile. He has some statements, which I think is a nice way to have some statements in here. And they're just basic, simple statements. You'll notice on his, which I don't see on too many people, he starts his out with exactly I help. You know, I help, I help, I help. So he is intentional in that because he is wanting to brand himself as a person who is a helper and how I help people and I help organizations. And he shows that over and over again consistently I help people and I help organizations. And then I like how he gets to the bottom though and has his specialties or his areas of expertise. This is just a really nice model. It doesn't mean yours has to be like this because there's no exact way, but I really like this as a model. So Kathleen has a great comment. I love the summary section. It's helped me out while, while temping and not having enough long-term employment to list on my page is separate jobs. Excellent. I think that's great because you can, you can really play with the summary section as much as you want and get it to something that you feel really speaks to who you are and that's what you can put in there. My tip is for you to create this in Microsoft Word so that you can do spell check and then just cut and paste it into your LinkedIn profile. That's my recommendation. Something else that I just found is doing a little, doing a little extra research on LinkedIn is that our profiles and I think the summary is a good place for it. Listing out a lot of different skill words gets your profile viewed 13 times more often than someone who has a very vague profile. And so what I tend to see again is that student profiles tend to be kind of vague because they don't know what to put in or they feel like they don't have enough experience. But I'm going to bet all of you have plenty of experience to create a really great profile and then just know it's always a work in progress. You're going to continue to work on it and tweak it and update it as you develop new skills. You work on new projects. You take new courses. You get a, you're volunteering somewhere. You get an internship. Tom says, I notice in these pics the head is almost full frame. Mine's cut at the head and full shoulders. What do you think? You know, I'd probably go look at your Tom to see, but you know, I'm sure it's fine actually if it's cut at the head and full shoulders. Yeah, I bet yours is absolutely fine. So long as I get a good look at who you are, I think you're set. All right, so we have picture, headline, summary section, and then we can get into experience. So in the experience section, be descriptive in your statements. Speak directly to your target audience. Who am I writing this for? Right? Who do I think are going to be my readers? And write it from that perspective. How you can do that is by looking at some job descriptions of the type of positions that you might be seeking to understand the market and the industry trends for the type of jobs you're seeking. That way you can use the same language, the same verbiage. So you want to try to be as precise as you can. Don't be afraid to add detail. So what I'm saying is just don't be vague. Sometimes it's so vague that I look at it and it's just like blah. Like it doesn't impress me. It doesn't wow me. It doesn't do anything. So make sure that people read it. They're going to get a good sense of who you are and what it is that you can do. Sometimes what I see on student profiles is it looks more like they have just listed some duties that they may have pulled off of the job description and then just put them in their profile. Without really putting thought into what do I actually do? What are my strengths? And going back to that question of how do I want to present myself to the world? What's my message? How do I want people to see me? So always be thinking from that perspective. And I think a good tip that I have for you is to look at other people's profiles for ideas. Just peruse. Look around and go, oh, I like the way they did that. I like the word that they used right there. You could also check out the community profiles through the iSchool and you could check out the alumni career spotlights. And that might just give you some different language to use or that might give you some names of students to go look up on LinkedIn and see what their profiles look like. Keep the questions coming if you have them. I'm just going to keep moving along but I do keep checking the chat box. Okay. So LinkedIn has made a point of making the profiles much more student friendly. So they're creating many more options that you can add to your profile. And having a section for projects is just one of those new areas. So you're all going to be working on projects in your coursework. And you're going to have links to some of the work that you've done. Maybe you've created a lib guide or you created a wiki or you created a website or a web page or you created content for a course or something like that, an online course. So you could link to those things or you could tell more about the project in terms of what you did to really show off and demonstrate your different skills. So examples here too show off publications, presentations, honors, awards, recognition, volunteering. Those are all sections that you can now include on your LinkedIn profile. So my point is think big. Think about all the things that you've done. It doesn't mean you have to include all of it. But think about from what you've done, what are those elements that I'm most proud of? What would I like to include? So that was, again, when somebody looks at my profile overall, they are getting that sense of who I am and what I can do. We have a question from Amanda. Is it better to use I statements or action statements I created managed in the experience section? That is a great question. This I think my answer is going to be my personal preference. It doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right way. In my experience section, I prefer using the action words because from that I can pull in a lot of different skills and strengths through those action words that I'm using. But I will say that that's not a definite. So with your LinkedIn profile, if you tried it and you liked the way it looked with I statements, there would be nothing wrong with that. So I guess the bottom line is either way is fine. Okay. Questions about including projects on your profile or publications or presentations or anything like that? Just know that all those options are there. And you can actually move these sections around on your profile so that you can choose the order that you want things to be in when people look at your profile. It's kind of cool. Okay. Kate says, are the iSchool blogs that we have or used for classes visible to the general public? No. I don't. It depends which blogs you're speaking of. If they are specifically related to classes, then they are not. If they are the bigger ones like I have a career blog and there's the new student blog and there's another one, I can't think of the name that Linda Main does, those anybody can find. But if it's a blog that's specific to your class, those aren't open to the general public. I think if you have a link to that, though, and there is no password or it's not behind a protected firewall, like say you sent me the link and I could just put the link in and pull it up, then you could use that same link on your profile and then other people would be able to go see the blog. I hope that answers your question. It makes sense. Okay. Yeah. So you could test it. You could just test it out and see. Okay. Another section. Oh, let me hit Tom's question. Yeah. I like that, Tom. So if some place is yes, I statements, other place action words, nice variation. I agree. Thank you. All right. Skills and expertise. This section on some level is subjective on your profile, but employers do look at it. And the reason I say it's subjective is that say one of you went and put in Jill Cleese and pulled up my LinkedIn profile, and then maybe it pops up and it says, is Jill skilled at social networking? And you could go, yeah, sure she is. So the point of that is you could be saying yes, and I could sort of be getting credit, I'll say, on here for having that as a strength. But you don't know if I really am skilled in social networking because maybe this is the first time we've ever even connected, right? So in that way, it can be very subjective. But employers do look at it. They kind of check it out. I always use a funny example if I have a friend, she's a good friend of mine that I work with and oftentimes it pops up on my LinkedIn profile. Does Evelyn have good time management strength, good time management skills? And I always laugh because she doesn't. And I'm not going to click that button that yes, she does, and it just makes me laugh. But I mean, I could, and then it's going to show up on her profile that she has all these people that are thinking she has good time management skills. So I always laugh because I'm like, no, she doesn't, but it always pops up as a strength that I could give her credit for. Anyway, so, oh, this is interesting, guys. All right, so this is a good spot. And in speaking of skills, again, I do a little bit of research and I'll, on LinkedIn. And the hottest skills in 2014 that actually got people hired according to LinkedIn is, I have a drum roll, because I want to see if anybody has any guesses because amazingly enough, those two skills that were the hot skills actually relate to some of the things that you're all learning, which was super cool. Anybody want to take a guess just for fun? I don't think you're really going to guess, but if anybody wants to type something in and see if you've got an idea. So again, this was on LinkedIn. I'll tell you what it came up as again. The hottest skills in 2014 that got people hired according to LinkedIn. So we have research, data scientist, organizing, leadership, research. Oh, so we got teamwork, organizing, verbal communication, social marketing. Good, good words. All right, let's see. Here we go. Statistical analysis and data mining. Isn't that fascinating? So I put here how it's defined, statistical analysis. So it's a component of data analytics, business intelligence. I hear those. We hear those as buzzwords in terms of titles that our LIS grads actually get jobs in. So of course that involves collecting and scrutinizing data and the data mining. Of course we know that as knowledge discovery. That's another word or title that I see come up. Process analyzing data from different perspectives. So I thought that was super, super fascinating. So even though data mining is a relatively new term or skill where that's coming out, the technology around it is not. And people with master's degrees in library and information science have been doing this type of work for years. It just was never called necessarily these terms. So if you feel, if we took the term of statistical analysis off and we took data mining off, but you looked at what they were actually doing, collecting and scrutinizing data, putting in and organizing that data, and then analyzing data. If you guys feel like you do that, you may very well be able to use these skills or put these skills in something that you're working on in your profile, on your resume. Right? Kind of cool. Looks like Tom's writing the question. Let's see. Aha. We have to do this for our e-portfolios. Of course. So that's something good to think about, Tom, because if that's actually, if we all break this down and you think about that is what you're doing for your e-portfolios, then that means you actually do have these skills, which means if you wanted to go for certain types of jobs that were using these skills, you could include this information on your resume or on your LinkedIn profile and you have to be able to talk about how you have the skill. What have you done that demonstrates that you do a statistical analysis so that you think data mining? But kind of cool. It's a big, big picture way to think about it. All right. Moving on. So what's next for all of you? You want to start to get recommendations on your LinkedIn profile. And here's how you do it. So you're going to click on, when you get to your profile, there's going to be a picture of you at the top right. You're going to click on that picture of yourself. And what it's going to pull up is going to say Account. And then you're going to go to Privacy and Settings section. And then it's going to look like this page that's on here and see how it's on the bottom where it says Manage Your Recommendations. You're just going to click on that. Up will pop a page and that's where you can type in who you want to send this invitation to. And then you just type in a brief note. Hey, would you be willing to write a recommendation for me? Or I'm in the process of building my LinkedIn profile while I'm now a new student in the MLIS program. Would you be willing to write a recommendation for me? Something like that. And send it off to people. I want to say don't be afraid to ask for recommendations. A lot of people think, oh, I don't want to impose or I don't want to give people extra work. Just do it. That's what it's for. And people will either do it or they won't do it. In my personal experience, people are more than willing to do it. They're just slow at doing it. I personally am very slow at doing it because it's like, oh, yeah, I would love to write that for you, but I'll just do that later because I've got other things to do right now. So there's nothing wrong with even after a month sending it again and then I'll go, oh, yeah, that's right. I was going to write that recommendation for a person. And then I'll just do it. And it really takes me probably less than five minutes when I actually sit down to do it. But it's not the thing that I jump on right away. So just know that. Yes, employers will look at them. They would definitely look at them. Now, it doesn't mean that they're going to take that as the real live recommendation, but they like to get a sense of who you're connected to, who are the groups that you have that you're following, how many connections that you have. They look at that because that tells them how involved you are in LinkedIn, and they will look at your recommendations. Who are the people that are recommending you? Who they are? What is their title? And what do they say about you? So, yeah. In terms of someone being a real connection, wait. Employers will be interested in our analysis. Well, what they're going to do is, again, they will look at who it's coming from. So did you work with this person? What was their title? Was that person your boss? Was that person a co-worker? They'll just look at the connection that way. And then you can also start to see when you have recommendations, and you want to shoot for about three to five recommendations. That doesn't mean you have to get those all right now. I want you to think about that over time, or during this time while you're a student, that that's your goal to start working up to having three to five recommendations. But typically, when you have those and somebody reads them, there should be a theme. There should be a relationship. There should be a pattern between what people are writing and saying about you. If they're completely all over the place, for me, that might be a little bit of a red flag. But if they're consistently talking about a person being a strong team player, getting along well with other people, being creative, being a strong program manager, whatever it is, then someone's going to see that theme and that connection, and that's going to resonate with them. So in terms of what's next, get your recommendations, and you want to join LinkedIn groups. There are thousands, literally thousands, of LinkedIn groups that you can join. So check them out. There's a lot of those that are related to different library fields, the different interests that you have. Find those groups and connect. In a minute, I'm going to show you one of the main reasons why that's so vitally important. Tom has a question. Let me read this again. I read it one more time, but too fast. Let me take this in a little bit more. Connector profile is set. OK, so the best place to start with the revamp or the creation of your profile. I would start first. I would get my picture on there. I would set it up. I'd get my picture. I wouldn't worry about having my catchy headline at this point. And then I would start building my summary section. So I would start looking around at other people's profiles, getting some ideas, thinking about the direction that I want to take my career, and I'd start building my summary. And maybe I'm going to start it out with two to four sentences at this point. And then I might think about, well, what are some of those areas that I specialize in or that I'm passionate about or that I might say, oh, I actually have an expertise in this. Maybe that's just a couple. And I might list those up there. So I'm going to start with that summary just to start to develop something. And then I'm going to put my experience in, because honestly, that's the easiest part when we think about, here was my job, here was my title, here's the dates, here's the things that I did. So I'm going to start to build that experience section. That's a pretty good start right there. And then from that experience section, if there were a couple of those jobs where now I want to reach out to a past supervisor or a co-worker that I had, I might then reach out to them to get a recommendation, or at least get my first recommendation on there. And then maybe around January or December, when you don't have classes, things will settle down a little bit, or you might make it your New Year's resolution. I'm going to go back to my LinkedIn profile. I'm actually going to put some dedicated time into it and start to build it out a little bit more. So I'm going to make some changes, revise a few things. And then, yeah, that's pretty good. Maybe I get another recommendation next semester. And then maybe again six months later, I've got some time. I'm like, yeah, OK, I'm going to go back and check my LinkedIn profile and update it a little bit more. So you can spread it out. I don't want this to be another thing that has to be done and it has to be perfect right now. But you just want to start. And then you want to find those chunks of time where you can really kind of sit and think about it. And then maybe you update a section. And then you're going to come back to it again another time. I think that's actually how I ended up starting mine. It was one of those things that was on my head for a really long time. And I kept putting it off and putting it off. And then it was around December, January time when things quieted down. I'm like, OK, now I'm going to put some dedicated time into this and start working on it. So hopefully that answers your question. OK, join LinkedIn groups. You can follow some companies. As there's companies that you're interested in, whatever it might be, follow them. You get some interesting feeds that pop up in LinkedIn. You can read about what's going on, kind of stay on top of things, get connected. We talked about that and how to connect and who to connect with. And it doesn't mean they have to remember you personally. But again, just the note of, hey, I saw you when you came to campus to give a talk about blah, blah, blah. Or you know what? Here's another one. When we have our career colloquia and we have professionals who come through Collaborate and they're giving a presentation. You're not meeting them in person, but you're connecting with them through Collaborate because they're teaching. I think about the one we just had last month. John is one of our adjunct faculty. And say I was on that, I was on his presentation on that session. I might very well go to LinkedIn, send him a message. Hey John, thanks for the colloquia session. I really appreciate the time you gave to us here at San Jose State. I learned so much from it. I'd love to add you to my professional network. Boom. Connect. Simple. Okay. I have this LinkedIn.com slash student jobs list right here. This one I recommend that you check out because what this does is this lists jobs that require about one to three years of experience in a particular area. So they aren't those high level, super professional high level of people who've been in the career for 10 years. They break it down to those one to three years of experience jobs, which is perfect for all of you. So I would recommend remembering this link, going there just to peruse and see what's there, and then use the advanced search option once you get there so that you can narrow your search. You could put in a geographic area. You could put in a particular job title rather than titles if you want to search by keywords. Maybe your keywords are going to be archive, research, information. See what comes up. So play around with the advanced search until you get it to a part where you're like, ooh, these are the kinds of positions that I like. And then you can save that search. And then you can always go back in and see what kinds of jobs are popping up. OK. Moving on again. So here's some really cool stuff that I want to show you about. Has anybody heard about the alumni tool through LinkedIn? Anyone? That's what I thought. All right. OK. Follow me here. So when you go to your profile page, under, I have the box around it up here at the top, connections. So if you drop down connections, alumni is one of your options. So you would choose alumni. And then it's automatically going to pull up San Jose State because that's where you're going to school right now. But if you go over here to the right-hand side in the blue box where it says change university, if you wanted to put in a different university, you wanted to put in your undergrad university, you could change the school. OK. But right now it's going to pull up San Jose State. Now, where this other yellow box is where it says, shows dates attended, you can leave it just like that or you could put in different date parameters. OK. So if the other and see where it says show more, if you wanted to click on that, it's going to drop these sections down even more. So there's more options to choose from. Everybody with me? OK. So here's what I want to point out. If we just went into the alumni tool, you chose under connections alumni, we leave the dates the way they are, it brings up San Jose State. See over here under what they do where it says information technology. I have the yellow arrow. If I just selected that just for what we're doing right now, I'm going to hit information technology. Then I'm going to go to this arrow on the far right here and change the page. So it's going to go to the next page. It's going to look like this. Then the page is going to say here's what they studied. I'm going to change it to this, library information science. So I'm narrowing my search. Look at all of these skill words that pop that. OK. Now you get one, you get to see what are the skill words that are showing up on people's profiles. But here's the part I can't show you. But if I were to be able to scroll down towards the bottom of this page, what is going to pop up is going to be all of the people. Look up here at the top left, 243. All 243 people are going to show down below that I can either connect with or send an inquiry to because they went to San Jose State. They have a library information science degree and they are just right now in the field of information technology. So here's how I can use this super cool thing. One, I can just do research. Where do they work? What are the companies that hire them? What are their current job titles? What are the kinds of things that they do? I can look at their profiles and see what was their first job out of San Jose State when they graduated with their MLIS? What was their career path? Like how do they kind of hop around the jobs to get where they are today? I might then be able to reach out to them and message through LinkedIn and say, hey, I found you on LinkedIn. I'm a current student at San Jose State getting my MLIS. I see that you graduated in blah, blah, blah year and you're working at a blah, blah company and I would love it if I could set up 15 minutes of your time on the phone and ask you some questions about what you do or ask you some questions about how you got your first job or ask you some questions about what advice would you give to a new grad who's interested in moving into blah field, right? You guys following me? So you can use this as an amazing tool to see what other alums are doing. So that's the alumni tool and I just encourage you to play with it. Just like you're going to be playing around building your profile, this could be another piece that you could start to play with because there is so much information right here at your fingertips. It's exciting actually, it's quite exciting. Okay, moving on, are we okay? All right, I'm moving on to the next thing I want to show you. So here's another thing that you could do with LinkedIn. On your profile page, it'll come up up here at the top right, there's the word advanced. I have it circled. If you hit advanced, now you're doing an advanced search, so I hit advanced. Over here on the left where it says search, these are the boxes that are going to come up. This is the advanced search options. So say all I'm going to put in is for the school, I'm going to put in San Jose State University and I'm going to put keyword, library and information science, that's all. I could put in titles, I could put in company names, I could put in California, I could put in Missouri, I could put in Chicago, right? You could play with this many different ways. You could also put in SJSU instead of San Jose State University and you're going to get different search results as well, so you want to try both. But just doing this, and I hit search, look up here towards the top, 6,075 results popped up just from that. That's crazy, right? But that's a lot of people to be looking through and checking out their profiles, a lot of people. So that's where you might want to narrow your search options, but I want to show you something else. See right here where it says Sandy Ortiz where it says group? So this means that she is part of a particular group that I'm connected to that I have joined on LinkedIn and that's why that has popped up. Let me show you something super cool about groups on LinkedIn. So I'm changing the page. All right. For example, how many of you belong to ALA? Raise your hands. Where's my, oops, how many we got? We've got about seven. Okay. So I'm using ALA as my example, but we could do this with any of the other associations as well, any of the other library groups on LinkedIn. But just with ALA, look up here at the top. There are 50,888 members. In fact, it's more because this is a page that I clipped a little while ago. So over 50,000 members belong to ALA on LinkedIn. Here's the cool thing. If you also are a member of this LinkedIn group, you are connected to all of those members, all of them because you're all connected in the same group. So here's how you have access to them. You see the pink square here that says members. You click on that, it's going to take you to something like this. So members and then there's going to be a search box. Now you could put whatever you want into this search box. I happen to put Adobe just to find people who are working at Adobe who also belong to ALA. But you could put in a person's name. So you wanted to find Heather Devine. You could actually put her name in and boom, she'd come up. You could put in a company name like I put in Adobe. You could put in a city. We could put in Chicago and see all the people at ALA who have Chicago in their profile. So you could play with it, right? But I put in Adobe and you can see 13 results came up. Okay? Because say I was interested in working there. Then see the green box here where it says send a message. If I click on that, I can automatically send a message to that person because we're connected through the group. I don't need to be connected to them outside of the group in my LinkedIn profile. I'm connected to them through the group. So I just click on send a message. It opens up. I put in a subject line and I put in a message. Say it's to Heather again. Hey, Heather, I noticed that you are, I found you on LinkedIn. I noticed that you're an alum from SJSU's MLIS program and you're working as Adobe. I'm really interested in what you do. And I would love it if I could set up 15, 20 minutes of your time and talk to you on the phone and find out how did you make the transition from San Jose State to working as Adobe, right? And send her a message. Yes. So Tom, there is a link to this collaborate session is actually on the career development page under career webcast. That's where it will be. But if you can't find it, send me an email and then I'll send you the link to it because we will have the recording of this. All right. Do you guys have questions about this? Because I think this stuff is fascinating. So you have a lot of fun researching to do to find people on LinkedIn. All right. So on the career development, it's just super cool. I think it's super cool. On the career development site, there's a section right here, social media and the job search. So things talking about creating your profile and how to use the site and social media tips. You can find more information right there. Actually, look right down here, Tom, where it says career webcast and e-newsletters. That's where the recordings to all of these workshops are housed. Right down there towards the bottom where it says career webcast. And here's tutorials. So if you go in the section where it says tutorials and more, here's more information about using LinkedIn and different social media. So I just want you to know all those resources are right there for you. You just need to go and check it out. So we've got about four minutes. Last-minute questions from people. Otherwise, my email address is there. You could always follow up with me later on. LinkedIn questions or other types of questions. Okay. So as I was looking at that last night, one of the pages about LinkedIn. Let me go back up here. One of the pages about LinkedIn was broken link. Oh, thank you. I'll go find that. Tom said, wow, thank you. I know. It's just super cool. Are QR codes dead? Yeah, Kathleen, I do feel like QR codes are dead. Yeah. I think it just died out. It's a good question, though. Yeah. This is good stuff, you guys. So it's just not hard. It just takes some time. Just a little dedicated time to get the profile together. But it's always a work in progress. And then play around with the alumni tool, the joining groups, and finding people. And if you get stuck or you forget how to do it, just email me. Send me a question, and I'll get the information to you. But it's good stuff. I'm glad it was helpful. Good. Very good. Yep, you guys are super welcome. So have a great evening. And I will follow up. And soon I'm going to stop the recording.