Dear Career Officers: We, the young, need you on LinkedIn

Career officers, where are you? Seriously, do you even exist? I'm not joking, most students don't even know you exist....

The more I see my friends do a deep dive on the work market completely blind to what is expected of them the more I realize that the transition between college and work is very serious and people do it very unprepared. There's no rule book and people feel lonely during this time. "But we exist! You need to come to us!" you say. The fact is that without a digital image, most of your students don't even know you're in their college. "I don't have time/patience/experience/ tech saviness/ etc to understand the digital sphere!" you might say. Why not start by a simple thing, like improving your LinkedIn image? Just try it...

So why do we need you, career officers, on LinkedIn? Here are a few reasons...

1 - Keep the college page updated and ready for the companies to check the cool things we do and learn at college - Reputation is everything in a digital age and a tech savy college makes all the difference in the life of a student. If a company is able to check what's being done at a college easily through an online page and profile, the company is able to check when students graduate and be aware of job fairs and presentations that happen during the year. What better way to show off the abbilities of your students than showing what the college is doing? You're the image of the college, don't forget it. Make your students proud to add you to their profiles with an active and friendly page;

2 - Keep up to date with new companies and new recruitment opportunities for established companies - We live in a digital world, job hunting has gone digital too. A large majority of positions in a company never goes to a job board so mantaining conversations with companies through their digital channels will enable you to check job opportunities on time and assure you are getting the best ones for your students;

3 - Keep tabs on the reputation and feedback of some companies - Job hunting is a land of many mines and you, as career officers, can protect us from some of them. Keeping tabs on companies hiring your students will allow you to see beyond the basic recruitment process and allow you to alert your students for possible red flags. We will thank you forever if you're able to help us understand if an offer is a too good to be true kind of offer so please, come to LinkedIn in order to research the companies searching for us;

4 - Interact and help us interact with communities that can help us during this transition - Communities are an awesome helper for young professionals in the scary transition phase to becoming a worker. Just a few searches online and you'll be able to keep contact with those communities and help your students to contact them. You'll be handing your students to environments of peers that will help them continue learning and knowing the work environment around their jobs;

5 - Be aware of funding opportunities and self employment programs - Some of us would love to embark on a self made journey of creating our own jobs but too often the funds are not enough. European, local and international funding opportunities are often publicized in digital channels such as LinkedIn. You can help us find them and understand how to apply, Wouldn't it be awesome to help the next entrepeneur to begin its journey?

6 - Last but not Least, we need to know YOU exist - most of your students are on LinkedIn already, we have already realized that job hunting has gone digital. Be here to help us and be here for us to even know that you exist. We want you help and we need your help on the places where we already are, like LinkedIn.

Feeling lost and not knowing where to start? I'll leave you two profiles of 2 awesome Pedros which can help you jumpstart your digital image: Pedro Caramez is a fantastic and patient LinkedIn expert that can help you take the first steps into this network, you'll find him here https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/caramez/ and Pedro Rebelo is an awesome expert in career strategy in the digital era that helps people from all parts of the career management machine (yes, even you career officers) to improve their strategies and objectives, you'll find him here https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/pedrojrebelo/ . They've helped me, they will sure help you.

Sincerely,

A Student/Researcher/Volunteer at a Tech Community