Written by Megan McBride, SIT Graduate Student/World Learning Americorps VISTA
Laura Beth Barnes, alum of SIT Graduate Institute’s Program in Intercultural Leadership and Management, quips that she first logged on to LinkedIn as a way to avoid working on her capstone, the final project SIT Graduate students complete before finishing the program. Her results, however, are not a joke: within ten days of creating an account, she received calls from head hunters offering her jobs in her field of sustainability and corporate responsibility. Now, Laura is honored that the same people whom she regarded as pioneers in her field while she studied at SIT Graduate Institute view her as their peer and contact her with questions.
In November of 2007, Laura signed-up for LinkedIn, an online professional networking site. At the time, she was skeptical about it and started out by inviting only five people to join her network. Wanting to keep her personal and professional life separate, she was at first hesitant to invite friends to join her network. Laura soon realized that having more people in her contact base gave her a larger network and she started to reach out to people in key positions and locations. From these initial contacts, she received a wide range of invitations from other professionals in her field.
Laura currently works as a Responsible Sourcing Manager for Mothercare PLC, a UK-based retailer with stores internationally. Prior to joining Mothercare in July 2009, she procured several short and long term consulting jobs through her connections on LinkedIn. Laura comments that jobs in the professional fields that SIT prepares students for are difficult to find and usually not advertised on online job sites such as Monster or Yahoo Jobs. She notes that using LinkedIn has not only introduced her to a wide net of people in her field but has also helped her stay in touch with those she meets at conferences and helps them to remember her and to understand her field of work.
Laura observes that LinkedIn is like Google in that you can search for profiles containing certain key words. She utilizes key terms from her field in her profile and recommends finding a balance between business and non-profit terminology to gain the broadest search results.
Laura cautions online networking site users to be vigilant with all their profiles, whether on professional sites or the more social sites such as Facebook. She guards her online presence and is aware that her reputation is at stake when she forwards a contact invitation from a colleague to a person in her online network.
Like a resume, Laura advises keeping profiles up-to-date with current information and accomplishments and she recommends updating profiles at least every two months. When a person updates his or her profile on LinkedIn, all contacts are automatically sent an update. Laura regards this as a perfect way to “stay on the radar” of other professionals in her field. She warns that one can not simply create a profile, leave it untouched and expect results. She strongly encourages other World Learning alums to take advantage of the global connections they have via World Learning’s LinkedIn site.
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