Signing into my LinkedIn profile for the first time in almost 8 years, I was met with the same apprehension as when I last looked at my Myspace page….Mainly “oh I have lost some weight” and “how does this thing work again”.
There have been plenty of times I have been told to add someone on LinkedIn or thought of jumping back on the digital horse to follow up with old workmates but I have always thought that it was another distraction that I did not need. I mean I work for a government department already so what can LinkedIn do for me? Little did I realise that despite the surface argument of what it can do for me I was missing a key element to the entire digital economy….Graduate Identity (Holmes, 2001). This means that as a graduate I was implored by the digital economy to take on my own employability and future direction through maintaining a professional space and an online identity reflective of my work and future development (Holmes, 2015).
Another important aspect of developing this online presence was that I may change careers, grow or want to progress on a tangent that I first did not see coming. This is the case with many people now who start off in a career and often find themselves retraining, moving or changing career paths completely within the first 10 years of employment (Eddy et al., 2010).
As part of this new career path I was assigned a task to reach out to people in my field of choice and ask them some questions, to build my network! So I embarked on this endeavour to reach out to some cyber security experts! I drafted my messages, read them, re read them, had my girlfriend read them, had my best friend who is sitting in a quarantine hotel read them. I then took all the changes and was left with pure gold. I had a short, succinct introduction, some carefully thought out questions and a brief thank you for their time……I then pressed send…..and waited……and waited.
Now while I currently do not have any responses I am returned to a more nostalgic time where I found myself sitting in front of my Myspace page
refreshing, waiting and watching for that message to be responded to by the girl I had a crush on, or by one of the cool kids, in the hope that the next day would bring on sudden “coolness”.
Spoiler alert, the crush never replied, I was never an overnight ‘cool guy’ and I still have not got a response from my messages, but I will continue to wait and watch and will keep you posted. Yet this online identity that I am developing is not one of a socialite but one of a professional graduate (well hopefully pending grades lol) and LinkedIn is a tool that will allow my personal brand to be seen and align with future employers and their core brand values.
References
EDDY, S. W. N., LINDA, S. & SEAN, T. L. 2010. New Generation, Great Expectations: A Field Study of the Millennial Generation. J Bus Psychol, 25, 281–292.
HOLMES, L. 2001. Reconsidering Graduate Employability: The ‘graduate identity’ approach. Quality in higher education, 7, 111–119.
HOLMES, L. M. 2015. Becoming a graduate: the warranting of an emergent identity. Education & training (London), 57, 219–238.
