How to screw up your education

Did that title grab you? It's not what you think. I'm talking about the Education section of your profile. This part:

Looks nice -- has the names of the schools and their logos. A nifty feature (maybe you didn't know) is that you can click on the logo and link over to a School Page maintained on LinkedIn. Well, when things go right you can.

This is the long-form article I promised in this update: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6414198757159763968

Now I said you could screw up your education. By that I mean your profile's Education section gives the name of your school, but the logo is a pale substitute and doesn't link to the school page. (I shouldn't put the blame on you for this. Possible offenders are the administrator of the LinkedIn page for your school, or the LinkedIn designers who built the handling process for the Add education screen.)

Here's an actual clip from someone's profile (disguised for privacy) who managed to get their alma mater's logo on only one of their two schools:

Why the logo for UC Davis but not Golden Gate University (GGU)? There's a perfectly good LinkedIn school page for GGU, so what went wrong?

There are at least three possible reasons for a school's logo to be absent from someone's Education section:

1. There's a school page but the profile owner didn't "grab" it when editing.
2. There's no school page, so there's no logo to grab.
3. There is a school page with a logo now, but the profile owner built the Education entry some time ago when the logo was missing.

Failure to grab existing school logo

Case 1 is all about keyboarding technique. Or shall we say, how typical, sane computer users believe data entry works and how they work the keyboard to match -- versus how some site designers implement the user interface.

First, here's how not to get the logo:

This is quite subtle. And I wish the LinkedIn designers were a little more schooled in human factors. Notice that within the long, blue-outlined field labeled "School," the person has typed "Golden Gate University" and to its left appears the dreaded gray ghost logo (red arrow).

The person's typing has made a drop-down list appear with several choices, all matching GGU some way. However, the screen will accept an Enter key and does not require that any of the drop-down choices be selected by a mouse-click. Fail to click and the profile owner loses. Good design?

Pressing the Enter key keeps the gray logo!

The profile owner is none the wiser, thinking that his or her correct spelling of the school name was enough.

But I am very certain that if you find a person with the gray ghost academic building on their profile and you click it, you will most likely be taken into a useless people search on the name of the school or some keywords in the person's profile, and not to the school's LinkedIn page. Try it for yourself. Look for that gray ghost academic building. Click it. See if the results resemble the right side of the header image for this article.

Next, we see a successful case. It's all in Click versus Enter.

The person has typed the Golden Gate University school name, they waited and watched the drop-down list appear, and they have also clicked on the top choice in the list. That mouse-click "pushes" the correct logo into the data entry field (at arrow), and a click on Save results in the Education entry with that logo. The logo, when clicked, links over to the actual GGU school page.

But I said there are other cases possible.

No school page

In Case 2, there could be a school a LinkedIn member attended that has no LinkedIn school page -- no admin ever created one. When the member types the school's name into the Add education form, it has no source from which to pull a logo.

School page exists or existed with no logo

In Case 3, there can be a school page on LinkedIn, but the administrator has not uploaded a logo to it. This would be very rare, as colleges and universities have been into branding in a big way for decades. So they are pre-disposed to make use of all social media to promote themselves.

What can happen, though, is that the profile owner builds the education entry when the school page exists, but has no logo yet. When the logo is later uploaded to the school page, nothing in LinkedIn's routine processing "pushes" the logo out to those members who need it. They have to edit their Education entries and select the logo to "pull" it in.

So if you want your school logo on your profile, watch how you type!

If for some reason your school has no school page on LinkedIn, ask the school's social media administrators to create one.

If they've made one with no logo, ask that they upload one. If you don't have the school logo, but you find the school's page does have one, edit your education entry and select the name+logo line in the drop-down list to get up-to-date.