Choosing career wisely with LinkedIn

Back when I was a kid, I used to fly kites, ride bicycle and play Board games for fun. Kids now a day spend hours on Facebook, mobile apps & video games. They would rather ‘Google’ a query than ask their elders about it. The World we live in today is changing exponentially at a pace faster than it did back when we were in college.

Jobs whose demand were sky high a few years back are now either extinct or the gap between their demand and supply of workforce is so huge that it ends up with zero bargaining power of the employee. On the other side changing society, trends and people’s perception of things is leading to new opportunities, new markets and eventually new Jobs.

As the Law of Constant change states that: "There is no such thing as a static state. If something doesn't vibrate, it doesn't exist. Nothing ever stays the same; everything evolves or degenerates."

Unfortunately, I haven't been a bright one when it came to choices regarding change. Even though I have my educational background from reputed institutions, yet I never actually had a real career counseling session, and those who did have it, were asked to choose from only a handful of options. I never had a bird’s eye view of the Job Market in Pakistan. The information sources that I depended upon more or less felt in the same category as of me.

Fortunately, assessing the need to make sound decisions, there are tools now that can help you decide, one of which is LinkedIn. Only a couple of days ago when I was updating my LinkedIn profile, stalking my peers and linking up with new connections, when accidentally I came across “Find Alumni” button in the connections tab.

The best thing about “Students & Alumni” is the practical application and the fact that it answers all the questions that more or less help you decide three things:

1. Career Choice.
2. Best Place to work in.
3. Critical comparative analysis of different universities based on Alumni model.

If we look at each of them separately, then under the “what they do” column it gives us quantitative analysis of professions (career line) chosen by university graduates. By shuffling the time duration to a more recent one, we can determine a trend that tells us, what career choices were popular back in time but are fading away today and similarly which career choice is the best one to make based on trends.

Similarly, under the “where they work” column, we can see companies that have been a popular choice of top University Alumni and the change in trend with respect to time.

Finally, the best part about this tool is that it helps you in comparative analysis of different universities based on Alumni model (you can change university by “change school” button). It not only tells you the difference between career choices of Alumni of different universities but also reveals the fact that a few companies hire only from one or two particular universities.

The application of this tool is very vast and can be put to multiple uses, like even when advising a younger one which university to enroll in when they have multiple options.