subject: The LinkedIn Career Network Toolbox is For a Must Have Tool For Professionals [print this page] The LinkedIn Career Network Toolbox is For a Must Have Tool For Professionals
With 70,000,000 professionals as members, any serious minded business person must consider adding LinkedIn to their tool box of career development activities. LinkedIn is the most pervasive professional network in the world. While Facebook has a lot more people, the social networking king can't hold a candle to LinkedIn for professional networking and business development uses.
LinkedIn provides resume-like information on your contacts and offers the means to grow your professional knowledge. It also provides tools and systems to steadily and continually build your network.
With clear understanding of your business goals and objectives, you can reliably and effectively identify job- and career-building opportunities. You can develop the resources you need for your business goal plans or determine a path to take a product or service to new customers and possibly even new markets. The fact is, LinkedIn is a tool limited only by your imagination.
There are groups that were established only a couple of years ago that have more than 250,000 members on the site. The founders probably had no idea what the potential impact of their effort would be and even now are still trying to understand the asset they have created.
A dedicated professional who is a member of a handful of the largest groups in their profession with only a couple years of professional experience could, by participating in discussions and seeking contact, develop a professional network in their specific field with contacts in senior positions and decades more experience. Not only could he or she develop this network, but with some effort the network might well be 1,000 contacts or even more in the course of only a year or two.
In some ways, LinkedIn is like a vast unexplored professional development frontier. The users are working to understand it. The LinkedIn company is trying to develop the tools that are most needed. And, at the same time, the community and its function is evolving almost unbelievably every few months.
For professionals, the most important fact is that joining and engaging the LinkedIn community at some level is an important professional development activity. This doesn't mean the activity should be all consuming. Instead, even a few minutes a week can go a long way. The really important fact is that professionals should consistently engage in expanding the tools and services they use, expanding their network, expanding their involvement, and managing the services offered. The last step, management, is important because the key is to gain value without becoming inundated by the information from the system.
So, get out there. Join LinkedIn and begin multiplying your career potential.
