July 24, 2015, by Laura Estrop

LinkedIn Guide to Starting Your Career After Graduation

By Darain Faraz, spokesperson for LinkedIn

If you have graduated this summer but haven’t got a job lined up yet, don’t worry. LinkedIn’s Darain Faraz shares his top tips for building your network and sussing out your first career move.

Get visible

It’s completely normal to find yourself surfing the net when you’re supposed to be looking for jobs, but you could be using your time online more productively.

As a first step, if you don’t already have a LinkedIn profile, get one. Next, show recruiters and potential employers that you’re open for business; you can do this by stating clearly in your headline and summary that you’re looking for graduate opportunities. The more complete your profile, the more interesting it will be to others, so take a few minutes to fill in each section to boost your chances of being ‘found’ by one of the 18 million UK professionals on the network. Make sure you include a photo, as this makes your profile up to 14 times more likely to be viewed.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any paid experience in your chosen field – few graduates do – include volunteering, academic skills and extracurricular activity to paint a picture of what you have to offer.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to find the perfect job or build a huge network overnight. Just nine minutes a day spent connecting with people or updating your profile on LinkedIn is all it takes to make a real impact on your network.

Nurture your network

There’s no need to leave it until you’ve found a job to start growing your professional network. Connect with family, friends, lecturers and contacts from internships and other experience now. You could even meet up with a contact for coffee – online connections are great, but meeting face-to-face can seal the deal.

Meet a mentor

The University of Nottingham also offers an eMentoring scheme through their careers service, which puts students in contact with a University alumni who has experience in the profession or industry that interests you. This offers you a great way to increase your network and more importantly, it links you to professionals within the industry you want to work in.

It’s also easy to find out where people from your university ended up through LinkedIn’s University Pages. Reach out to people in your dream job and ask for some guidance – they’ll have some great advice and tips to share.

If you would like to find out more information about using LinkedIn, visit their website, or you can have a look at our top tips for online networking on our website. 

Photo: Esther Vargas – LinkedIn Logo

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