Project 52: Week 48

An opening reflection and meditation ...

"The most important thing is that sometimes you have to go through hard times to get to the good stuff." ~ Abby Wambach

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."- Martin Luther King, Jr

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"What does the Lord require? Only to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." - Micah 6:8

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of our Career Services initiatives. ~ Gerald Doyle

Career Accompaniment: Week 48

WELCOME to A LinkedIn profile

With very few exceptions, we encourage students and alumni to create and maintain a LinkedIn profile as part of their ministry practice.

While social media participation can be a controversial topic, we have found that a LinkedIn presence, the basic model of which is free, can be highly beneficial to most individuals as well as to organizations and institutions.

In today’s digital world, your LinkedIn profile is a close parallel and often a substitute for your resume or curriculum vitae (CV). It is free to virtually everyone to create and provides a bridge to a vast community of professional contacts.

From a Tri Cosain perspective, we invite our participants to use their LinkedIn profiles as a way to crystallize three elements of the Tri Cosain experience

• Their sense of personal inspiration
• Their career vision
• Their personal brand

When you create a LinkedIn profile, you can create a headline description of yourself in a line or two and a summary of your personal profile and offering to the world. Both of these can be lovely contexts to crystallize in a few words what inspires you and what your vision of your career may be like.

In the body of your LinkedIn profile, you can describe your relevant work, volunteer, and field experiences and link them to the extensive LinkedIn database of employers and other organizations. Similarly, you can share your educational experience and link those experiences to the LinkedIn pages of your academic institutions.

Your work experience and educational achievements -- as well as your academic and pastoral writings and reflections -- can elaborate your sense of your historical or intended contribution - what value did you add or create? … and …how does this reflect the value you want to add or create in the future? What did you learn along the way, and what skills and capacities do you offer to future employers, partners, and collaborators?

Your profile also creates space to record your voluntary and pro bono work and publications if you have them.? We invite our participants not to be shy -- even courageous -- about posting items they have published, for example, essays, articles, and blog posts, even if they have not (yet) reached a broad audience.

Your profile will show your online activity, including material you post on LinkedIn, articles (usually a bit longer and more persistent than posts), and items you have liked or shared with other people.

Your profile has a section where you can record recommendations given and received. These are public to everyone looking at LinkedIn, so they can be a valuable source for building your profile in the marketplace.? You can start this journey by offering recommendations for your friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Even for those hesitant to start with a public professional profile, we recommend starting early on LinkedIn and building from a minimal base. We expect you will find three benefits:

1. Crystallizing your sense of inspiration, vision, and branding will support your thinking, understanding, confidence, and growth

2. Making yourself visible to others will begin to stimulate conversations that will be helpful to you in expanding your horizons and building your career vision

3. Becoming a member of the LinkedIn community, with all its many sub-communities, will create countless opportunities for you to reach out to others, build your network, and spark Conversations of Inquiry

As always, I am available and keen to accompany you and help you create and develop your LinkedIn profile, as with all other aspects of your Tri Cosain career journey.

Monday, 21 October 2024

Gerald Doyle, Career Services

Recommend Viewing.

• In Episode 103: Abby Wambach, drawing on nearly two decades of teamwork and sporting successes, shows us what teamwork looks like, what leadership stands for, and how you can achieve bigger goals, overcome any obstacles in your way, and unleash your true potential in her book - Wolfpack.

00:01 - Intro

04:30 - Forget me

12:20 - Make failure your fuel

22:30 - Lead from the bench

34:00 - Champion each other

41:00 - Demand the ball

51:57 - Wisdom is your long game

54:50 - The most important thing Abby has learnt

Residing in Chicago, Gerald Doyle provides ministry placement research and consulting for Career Services at the Catholic Theological Union and career services and coaching to students, families, and community members at Wolcott College Preparatory High School. He advises several edtech companies, including Upkey and GetSet Learning, and serves as the Interim Chief Administrative Officer at the US-China Catholic Association and as president of the board at Syrian Community Network

Scott? Downs, a former investment banker, management consultant, and entrepreneur, now works as an Agile coach, seeking to call forward great leaders and organizations based on great cultures. He is a consultant with Expleo Group and is an associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice that weaves inspiration, learning, and career for leadership in life and work. Gerald and Scott co-authored 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work, Conversations of Inquiry, and several other volumes in the Tri Cosain series. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity, and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.

Copyright Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle 2023-25