LinkedIn. Having a professional presence on LinkedIn is super important. 1) Recruiters and hiring managers search LinkedIn profiles for passive candidates for jobs. So if a recruiter is looking for a training coordinator in Austin, you want to come across their list. 2) Hiring managers will immediately look at LinkedIn after meeting you to see who you and if you know anyone they know. (It’s Kinda like an informal reference check or asking a friend if they saw that movie). 3) LinkedIn also posts jobs and recommends jobs. So you want a professional LinkedIn account. 4) LinkedIn has groups that you can join where people share ideas and posts questions and answers to issues. Join a few. 5) With a premium account you can send “InMail” messages to people in your field and request informal interviews.
Twitter. Twitter is useful as you can follow training magazine and individuals who share relevant information. So you can start to build a brand that says, “I know what the latest trends in fields and I am a person with information, contacts, and answers to potential problems.” At the very least you want to be someone a training leader can bounce ideas off of. So read, retweet, and tweet. A few that I follow are: @CLOmedia, @TrainingMagUS, @Edfutures, @TrainingJournals, @SHRM. You can also follow me @ClydeInTraining
SlideShare: SlideShare.net allows you to view your slides without people being able to copy them without your permission. SlideShare also allows you to tweet your slide deck or share it through LinkedIn. This is very useful in displaying side projects & Work Samples. Today, hiring managers want proof. They want to know that you can do something. So I advise people to create and do side projects at home or for not for profit organizations. These help increase your experience. These will be funded by you in most cases, but very much worth the investment. Side projects allow you to try out technology, skills, and areas of interest without a lot of pressure. If you fail, no one really knows, and if you succeed then you can list it on your resume as experience. I typically list stuff like this under activities or projects. This type of stuff is also very good for giving you things to talk about during the interview. It also lends itself very well to becoming a work sample.
Work Samples: Again hiring managers want proof. And if someone has two candidates that are close in an evaluation, most hiring managers will go with the person who can prove that they can do it. In the creative fields, job seekers are asked to show their portfolio or reel. Well, in the business arena more and more people are being asked to show a work sample. There are two ways to approach this. Most places would be very uncomfortable with you showing their confidential information to prospective employers. I recommend re-creating a project report with fake information or creating a project from scratch. This shows what you can do without giving information. Additionally, you can show materials, survey results, and project reports from side projects.
LinkedIn. Having a professional presence on LinkedIn is super important. 1) Recruiters and hiring managers search LinkedIn profiles for passive candidates for jobs. So if a recruiter is looking for a training coordinator in Austin, you want to come across their list. 2) Hiring managers will immediately look at LinkedIn after meeting you to see who you and if you know anyone they know. (It’s Kinda like an informal reference check or asking a friend if they saw that movie). 3) LinkedIn also posts jobs and recommends jobs. So you want a professional LinkedIn account. 4) LinkedIn has groups that you can join where people share ideas and posts questions and answers to issues. Join a few. 5) With a premium account you can send “InMail” messages to people in your field and request informal interviews.