I'm in a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn. I love the reach and networking of the site. I hate how Facebook-y some posts have become and I loathe getting unsolicited messages from individuals that appear to think it's Tinder (completely unprofessional and borderline stalker-ish). Lemme break down the dichotomy...
On the side of "love", it *is* where most professionals can be found. It also helps to see an individual's work experience if you are a hiring manager or want to know more about a new teammate. Furthermore, LI offers suggestions for how to get noticed and/or appear on more searches--one would be foolish not to take these things into account! If you haven't updated your LinkedIn profile, you should get How to Write a Killer LinkedIn Profile and make it happen! One should also sign up for alerts for any brands, organizations, job searches, and/or leaders that one wants to follow. If you join a new team or someone joins yours, add her/him/them to your network! By the way, did you know that a candidate's experience is being looked at through a different lens, post-pandemic? Here are 10 Surprising Stats You Didn't Know About LinkedIn.
On the "hate" side, there seems to be a trend of over-sharing (TMI) that is quite personal on what I consider to be a professional social site which should skew posts towards work-related content. Here's a great summary of what I mean. Look, everyone has personal demons to overcome/struggles that have made them stronger. And I'm all for contextualizing how we can leverage insights gleaned from everyday life and apply them to work life, but c'mon! No need to over-dramatize to get a "like". One other annoying thing is related to including a photo as part of your profile. A photo of oneself is helpful, of course, as people sometimes recognize faces but may forget names so it's good to humanize a profile that would otherwise be just a list of cold facts; HOWEVER, this also has the potential to open up your DM to people who want to date you (not the platform, people!). Lastly, there are phishers and spammers getting your personal information off your profile, robocalling or worse, stealing your identity because there is so much detailed info at their fingertips. I also submitted an online application for a job that I believed was legit--it wasn't. Unbeknownst to me, there were multiple attempts to falsely open an account in my name. Which was unfortunate since my sole intent was to desperately find a job after having been laid off for a year in 2020.
I will say that after not being able to find a job for so long and looking at the job postings, I saw I lacked a pre-requisite that popped-up, time and again, each time I searched for the position I was qualified for because I had the experience. What I lacked was an MBA degree. What did I do as a result? I enrolled in an online program at Benedictine University to increase my hire-ability and close that gap. I plan to be a May 2023 MBA graduate.
Top Skills & Hire-ability
Professor Todd Kelsey sees having CASA Marketing skills [Content, Search, Analytics, Social] as a solid foundation for being considered a prime candidate for hot job market in the field. CASA Marketing skills are focused on those things that will get you hired and this conclusion is underscored by an almost decades-worth of data where "Year-to-year digital marketing continues to come out at the very top of all skills for getting people hired, even up against coding and software development, etc." Being a living, breathing digital marketer, I know this to be true. I don't like labels, generally speaking, but my inner analyst enjoys putting behaviors into homogenous groups, which helps glean insights that might shape how an audience is parsed to receive unique marketing messages based on similar behaviors.
That said, I started out as a One-to-One marketer that evolved into a database marketer that evolved into CRM marketer to arrive at being a digital marketer. Honestly, it's all the same but it's only the labels that changed. See where I am going with this? It's a label. At the core, it's all about getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Period. "Digital Marketing" feels too channel-specific-a-skill in my eyes because the reality is this: "digital" is the vehicle or platform...the marketing is and always will be "the action or business of promoting and selling products or services". So go ahead and keep changing the labels, just know that at the core, I am really good at doing the thing that marketing does: getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time...in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible.
What Color is Your Parachute? (2022 edition)
I used this book yeaaaaars ago and didn't realize it maintains its relevance by getting updated every year with information that is quantifiable, actionable, and timely. There's a quote in the book, chapter 4, pages 73-74: "If you can, you’ll do better to start with yourself and what you want, rather than with the job market and what’s 'hot.' The best work, the best career, for you, the one that will make you happiest and most fulfilled, is going to be one that uses your favorite transferable skills; in your favorite subjects, fields, or special knowledges; in a job that offers you your preferred people environments, your preferred working conditions, with your preferred salary or other rewards, working toward your preferred goals and values. This requires a thorough inventory of who you are." I believe that the pandemic triggered a self-inventory, a gut-check, a pause-and-think assessment in the minds of every employed person. Each person over the last two years has asked themselves these three questions:
- "Was I excited to work every day last week?"
- "Did I have a chance to use my strengths every day?"
- "At work do I get a chance to do what I'm good at and something I love?"
If the answer was, "No", the next question was likely, "Then what am I doing here?" Roll tide.
In the Harvard Business Review article that listed out those three questions there is a study referenced, "ADPRI’s most recent 50,000-person surveys of stratified random samples of working populations around the world, the most powerful predictors of retention, performance, engagement, resilience, and inclusion...only when a company intelligently links what people love to their actual activities will it achieve higher performance, higher engagement and resilience, and lower turnover." This confirms what was found in chapter 4 of What Color Is Your Parachute?
Another perspective is that "The Great Resignation is more constructively viewed as The Great Migration—people are seeking new opportunities for meaningful work. People do not derive joy or a sense of value from performing the same tasks, over and over again, that take up the majority of their time each week and stymie their creativity." One thing is certain, "The move to remote work and changes in job flexibility may not have occurred for another 30 years if not for the [Covid-19] crisis." I am not so sure. Here's are a couple of articles, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic and a great infographic. These tell me the trend was definitely there, and there *might* be some attribution to the pandemic to explain the snowball-effect. One thing I *do* know is that there is definitely no going back to business as usual. That ship has sailed.
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