LinkedIn has more than 70 million professionals as members. With this in mind, it is prudent for any serious professional or business person to consider LinkedIn careers as part of their resource in career and/or business development. It is the most persuasive professional network in the world and its popularity in professional networks can be compared to the popularity of social websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
LinkedIn offers the means to grow your professional knowledge by providing resume/curriculum vitae like information on your contacts. It also provides systems and tools to continually and steadily build your network. With a clear understanding of your professional/business objectives and goals, you can effectively and reliably identify career and business-building opportunities. You can develop everything you need to determine a path to take a service or product to new clients or even new markets, or develop links to potential jobs that will help achieve the goals you set for your career. Simply put, it is a tool that is only limited by your imagination.
Some of the groups on the website were established a couple of years ago. A good number of these groups have more than 250,000 members. This means that it is easy to take a look at similar LinkedIn careers when you are a member of such groups. The founders might not have understood the impact of their effort in the past, and they may still be trying to understand the potential of the asset they have created. It is therefore important to join a group that is directly or indirectly related to your career.
LinkedIn Careers – Means Of Joining The Professional Platform
If you are a dedicated professional who has joined a handful of the largest groups in your profession, you could develop a professional network in the same field by seeking contact and participating in discussions with contacts with decades more experience and in senior positions. Not only could you develop this network, but with a little effort the network might be more than 1,000 contacts in the course of a year or two.
In some ways, LinkedIn careers can be described as a professional development frontier that is vast and unexplored. As users are working hard trying to understand it, the company is trying to develop tools that are needed the most. At the same time, every few months the community and its functions are evolving at an unbelievable rate.
An important development activity for professionals is joining and engaging the LinkedIn community at some level. A professional should not take this to mean that the activity should be all consuming. On the contrary, he or she can decide on the time they can allocate to develop their career. For instance, an hour each week can go a long way in career development when using this platform.
Professionals should consider consistently managing the services offered, expanding their engagement, expanding their network and expanding the services and tools they use. Management, the last step, is crucial because the key is to gain value without becoming swamped by the information from the system. This is how one can effectively benefit from Linkedln careers.