Get Connected to Professionals!!

LinkedIn has just announced a new product aimed at high school students. It's called University Pages. It goes live September 12th. Mark your calendar!!

LinkedIn is one of the tools I use on a regular basis for recruiting. Whereas Facebook is used for social networking (friends and family), this is professional networking, connecting you with professionals. It has over 200 million professionals registered. Professionals? What, exactly does that mean? It means these are people who are in the business world.......Teachers, Engineers, Sales Consultants, Product Marketing Managers, Administrative Assistants, Buyers, Technicians, Game Designers, Forensic Specialists, Interaction Designers, Political Speech Writers..........there are so many!!

If you already have an idea about what kind of career you'd like to pursue, then University Pages can help you determine what college might be best for that particular career path. It also lets you connect with alumni from the colleges you're interested in.  You'll be able to find someone from a particular college that either majored in what you want to major in or is working in the field that you're interested in for a career. When you find these people you can send them an InMail (LinkedIn's internal messaging system) and start a conversation with them.

You can ask them things like what college life was like. Or you might want to know more about their current job and whether their college major prepared them fully for it. Maybe they have some advice on classes to take. In one of my past posts, I wrote about a young woman I found while looking on LinkedIn. Her college path and subsequent career were more like this

than this










And she would be happy to talk to you about her school-to-work path as well as share her thoughts  about college, networking with professionals and her present day career.

YOU CAN START MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH PROFESSIONALS BEFORE YOU EVEN GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL!!!!!

I was looking for a video demo of how to use University Pages but could only find one that was geared towards college administrators and not you, the high school student. I'm sure that once the product goes live on September 12th, they will have a demo on the site for you to check out. But here's the LinkedIn product introduction blog post which you might find helpful.

Good luck!