Does your child's college value LinkedIn as part of its career transition plan?

Selinda Cortez will tell you that she wished she had learned more about the power of LinkedIn before she met me.

“I wished I had learned about LinkedIn before my internship and my senior year,” she told me.

A San Antonio healthcare company recently hired Selinda just one week after her graduation. In a recent LinkedIn message, Selinda shared this thought on our work together to update her profile: “And it was through a connection on LinkedIn!”

Our work together overcame her doubts, and if I was a parent or relative of someone like her, I would question why colleges don’t stress LinkedIn as a career development tool.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Most colleges have career advising centers. A few are truly exceptional. My alma mater was terrible. After I graduated from UTSA, I asked for a meeting with them to discuss how we could help students with a LinkedIn course. They had hired a guy to lead their career assistance department.

Before working for my alma mater, he had recruited students to work at a rental car company.

His response typifies what most people my age believe about LinkedIn’s branding capabilities.

“Why do my students need LinkedIn?” he bellowed to me. “I didn’t need it.”

College students like Selinda and Jack Nye would disagree. I recently met Jack, and this was his comment about what he learned in a basic course offered by the Citadel Alumni group.

If you are a parent or a relative who will take a high school or junior college student to visit your alma or some other school, can I suggest a visit to their career services office?

A career services office is not on the standard college tour program. College tour guides will take their potential students to a student union and visit the bookstore to purchase their college T-shirts. Visiting a career services office takes some planning ahead of any college tour.

When you visit that career services office with your student, I would ask someone in charge the following question:

1. How do they teach their students about LinkedIn? A great college program will have a link to some of their best graduates so a potential student can reach out and connect with them. I’d look at that person’s profile to check their content. If the picture is outdated or there isn’t a banner or much content, I’d doubt how much their department truly believes in LinkedIn’s value statement.
2. Do they understand the difference between a student resume and LinkedIn? Too many college professors still believe that a LinkedIn profile is another way to share a resume.
3. Is there a curriculum given by their department or within their student major plan?
4. Does the career services office provide their students with a photo session to place within their profile?

I love to hear from college students, their parents, and college professors about how they understand how LinkedIn can help their students advance their professional careers.