Tag: LinkedIn

Spring clean your job search

by Lauren Kemp

Classes are ending, exams are beginning, and before we know it, summer will be here. It’s easy to get caught up in all the activity the end of the semester brings, but now might be your best chance for doing some “spring cleaning” in your job search.

If you’re still seeking opportunities, now is the perfect time to get organized for applications and interviews. If you’re looking forward to starting a new role this summer, there is plenty you can do in preparation.

So, what exactly should be on your to-do list?

Update your resume to include any highlights from the past semester

Did you take on a leadership role in an organization? Did you do any research or work on any publications? Did you win any awards or complete an internship? Write about it! Make sure your resume is up-to-date with all of your recent accomplishments.

Proofread, proofread, proofread

Never underestimate the power of a typo: a simple error in your resume or cover letter may signal to a hiring manager that you lack focus and aren’t detail-oriented. Take a few minutes to check over your materials again. Even if you’ve already nabbed a position, it can be helpful to review documents for content: you may need to resubmit your resume for a performance review or even a professional award.

Polish your LinkedIn profile

Have you been neglecting your LinkedIn profile (or have you been too afraid to create one)? Check out our LinkedIn tips (here, here and here), and use the spring to search for new connections on the site. Just like your resume, your LinkedIn profile should be updated frequently to reflect your experience.

Sanitize your social media and internet presence

Are there one too many Fling photos lurking on your Facebook profile? Do your Twitter followers know you from your handle @FlipCupMaster92? If so, it is time to clean up your online presence. If you simply cannot bear to untag or delete unprofessional content, at the very least, turn your profiles to private. But remember: the internet never forgets. Use some discretion whenever posting to your social media accounts, and encourage your friends to do the same.

Clear out your voicemail and e-mail inboxes, and make sure you have set up proper forwarding messages

You don’t want to miss an interview request or an important memo from the boss because your inbox is full. Regularly clear through your messages, and make sure that you have set up professional voicemails and e-mail signatures. If you’re losing your Penn e-mail account, set up forwarding and update your QuakerNet profile so that classmates and Penn connections know how to contact you.

Spiff up your wardrobe

Whether you’ll be interviewing this season or entering the professional world, make sure that your clothes are up to the task. It might be necessary to hem pants and skirts, sew loose buttons and dry-clean suits and delicate items. Think about donating or recycling any clothes that have seen better days, and plan to shop for items that will match the dress code in your place of work.

Keep these tips in mind, and your job search will be spic and span in no time. If only all spring cleaning could be so simple…

Roomba

Making the Most of LinkedIN

by Tiffany Franklin, Associate Director

linkedincomputerAre you utilizing every aspect of LinkedIn in your Job or internship search? It’s a powerful tool that goes beyond sending and receiving requests to connect. As a recruiter, I used to post jobs on LinkedIn all the time and search for quality candidates. Here are a few ways to make LinkedIn one part of your comprehensive search.

  1. Jobs Tab – Under the jobs tab, look for the “Advanced Search” feature on the top right near the blue search button. That will allow you to specify the industry and location. Once you take that step, you can look at the categories on the left and type “intern” under job title or “Entry level” under Experience level. In many cases, you will see the name of the recruiter posting a position, so you can address your cover letter to that person. In addition, there are links to the company LinkedIn page.
  2. Researching a Company via LinkedIn pages – Go to the search box at the top of your profile and select “Company” in the drop down option at the left hand side of the box. Then, type the company name and you will be taken to the company’s official LinkedIn page. This will show you a brief profile of the company, current job postings through LinkedIn and if you have any first or second degree connections. If you have second degree connections, you could see if any are someone you know well and if they would be willing to make an introduction for an informational interview. Remember, company LinkedIn pages are helpful, but be sure to go to the company’s website, Glassdoor, and the Vault, for more comprehensive research. See http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/networking/InfoInterviews.php for tips about how informational interviews fit into your job search strategy.
  3. Networking – Speaking of informational interviews, LinkedIn is a wonderful tool to cross-reference with QuakerNet to find Penn alumni for possible informational interviews. Go to the Connections tab and “Find Alumni.” As of this spring, you will see almost 117,000 Penn alumni on LinkedIn and you can search by city, company, industry, majors, and skills.
  4. Your own Profile – Given all the activity on LinkedIn, you want to keep your profile in top shape. Be sure to update it frequently and include your academic projects, research, internships, activities, volunteer experience, professional development, and skills.

Career Services is here to help, so be sure to come in for a walk-in or make an appointment and one of the counselors will be happy to critique your profile and demonstrate the strategies outlined in this post.

Your Summer Network

by Shannon C. Kelly

“It’s all about networking.”

network

No matter what your summer plans were, whether you interned, volunteered abroad, or conducted research on a college campus, if you met new people, your network grew.  Now that summer is wrapping up, it’s important to make sure you can take your summer network with you.  The saying “It’s all about networking” is true because it’s not just who you know, but who knows you when it comes to looking for your next internship or full-time position.

1. Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the first tool that comes to mind to stay in touch with your new connections.  If you’re not using LinkedIn yet, sign up right now, or at least when you have 5 minutes.  Their Student Jobs 101 website is immensely helpful with tutorials and checklists to get you up and running on the platform.

2. Personalize Connection Requests.  On LinkedIn, the power lies in your connections.  When you reach out to your colleagues or peers you met this summer, make sure you personalize your note.  Adding a simple line makes a big difference to show you took the time to remind them how you met and/or why you’d like to connect.  This rule applies to other platforms, too.

3. Leverage Other Platforms. There are many other social networking sites that can help you stay in touch with your summer network.  Facebook is a natural choice, but be mindful of who you’re adding and how you use Facebook already.  Do you want to keep it personal or are you comfortable adding professional contacts? Twitter is also helpful, especially if you’re an active user already.  Twitter can help you build your network beyond those you met this summer through by including popular hashtags related to your professional interests, participating in Twitter Chats, and following organizations and their employees.

If you’d like to learn more about using LinkedIn or social media to stay in touch with your summer network or build it up even more, utilize our resource, Build Your Brand. Remember, we also over LinkedIn Profile reviews – so come in to see us if you have questions!

 

Change your feet…, and other useful career advice

Dr. Joseph Barber

Those of you who have watched Disney’s “Brave” will probably have taken away some of the following points from watching the film:

  1. Your fate is in your own hands – be proactive and stand up for what you believe in
  2. Some witches believe that turning people into bears is the answer to any problem
  3. Don’t buy gammy spells from scaffy witches!

There is all sorts of important career-related advice one could probably take from this film – I’ll leave you to extract most of this. It is pretty direct in terms of the message it tries to get across…, unless you are four-year-old who isn’t very familiar with Scottish accents. If you happen to be one of these people, then the film makes no sense at all. With that nice Scottish accent, the key message of the film, “change your fate”, ends up sounding more like “change your feet”. I know this because when I asked my four-year-old what she thought “Brave” was all about, she said it had to do with taking your shoes off and getting new ones. From her perspective, Brave was all about finding the right shoes – a process involving:

  • Magical sprites
  • Terrifying bears
  • Limb loss
  • Suitors competing with one another
  • Mother-daughter arguments
  • Witches
  • Spells
  • Regret, resentment, and guilt
  • More terrifying bears
  • Mother-daughter bonding
  • Self-discovery
  • Did I mention the terrifying bears?

It is perhaps not surprising that my daughter is not so keen on going shoe-shopping when given the choice. From her perspective, the high likelihood that some of these situations may arise must certainly be a trifle off-putting. Actually, changing your shoes is still not a bad analogy for all sorts of good career-related advice in terms of the process of changing your fate. In fact, it is a much more practical approach that is easier to visualize and implement. I might be wary of messing with the cosmos by playing with my fate…, but I am much less scared by the notion of trying on a different pair of shoes for a while to see if they fit, or if I like the way they look, or the direction they are taking me.

The advice I am going to extract from this film for you, however, is focused on how you talk about your experiences in your application materials. Accents don’t interfere with what you write in your cover letter or CV/resume, although poor English certainly does, but there can be accent-like issues. If you describe your experiences and skills by talking solely about your academic research in a very academic research kind of way, then you will have a “research accent” or an “academic accent” to your resume. People who read this resume who are not researchers (perhaps they are program administrators, HR staff, or business executives) may not understand what skill you are trying to demonstrate when they read your descriptions because of these accents. They may take away a completely different meaning from what you have written, even though it sounds like it makes perfect sense to you. As you apply for jobs in a broad range of career fields, you will need to become familiar with the different accents you can use to translate your experiences in different ways. It can be hard to first understand and then learn new accents if all you do is read about them online, so the best approach is to immerse yourself in environments where those around you are using these accents all the time. In other words, network with people working in different career fields and find opportunities to interact with them (e.g., volunteer opportunities, informational interviews, internships). You’ll pick up some of the accent in no time at all, and it will be very helpful in your applications and interviews within that career field.

Whether you hope to change your fate or your feet, you will find that the fantastic network of Penn alumni you can connect with through QuakerNet and LinkedIn will be invaluable. Like the wisps, they can point you in the right direction…, unlike the wisps, they probably won’t lead you down a path that ends with terrifying bears (probably). Listen to what they say and use what you hear to help you refine the way you talk about your own experiences.

Next time, perhaps I will talk about the career advice you can glean from Disney’s “Frozen”. Here’s a hint, I think it will be along the lines of “Let it go…, Let it go…”

The question is, what is “it”?

 

Working with the end (of the year) in mind

Dr. Joseph Barber

In thinking about what careers you might explore when you graduate with your PhD, or once you finish your postdoc, it would certainly be helpful to know where others have gone before you. Those people who have made it through your programs before share a lot in common with you.

  • They had passion around a similar subject area.
  • They experience the same types of faculty support
  • They had access to similar networks of contacts and career resources
  • They faced much the same type of job market
  • They also wanted to find a role that would engage them intellectually, challenge them mentally, and support their continued professional development and personal lifestyle.

The career options they have pursued might be those that you would also find interesting. The skills they use in their careers might be similar to the skills you current use in your research. Traveling down well-beaten paths is not the only way to reach a successful career destination, but it can certainly be an effective one. This is especially true when people in these different career fields are willing to share their experiences and insights with you to help you come to a more informed decision about your career path, or to prepare yourself for a specific path more effectively.

Let’s review the different levels at which you can seek information about career options, and find contacts through networking to help you find some of the answers that you are seeking.

The Penn connection

Penn has a rich history of engaged alumni, and current students can continue to make marvelous connections with a wide range of professionals in different careers by making use of the Penn alumni searchable database – QuakerNet. This is not a resource for asking people whether they have a job for you, but can be a great place to make connections to help you learn more about what it is like to work in a certain role, in a particular company, within a broad industry, and so on. Simply by asking people what they do, and what skills they use to do it, you can absorb some of the language you might be able to use to describe your past experiences in terms that your future employer might better understand – to use their language to make your skills relevant. If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution, then make sure that you put “set-up more informational interviews” at the very top of your list.

By now, you have hopefully been exposed to the potential that LinkedIn can offer you in terms of making connections with people like you doing interesting and wonderful things in many career fields. I know some people are a little resistant to this resource for many different reasons, but if you just see it as a powerful career exploration tool, then it can help you overcome some of these concerns.

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