Portfolio Tips

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Your portfolio on LinkedIn is alive and will evolve. After you’ve done the initial profile creation, you can tailor your LinkedIn portfolio to your specific story with your own visualizations of evidence. It’s important to build your portfolio continuously as your experience and evidence grow. This may include updating your connections by networking with friends, family, peers, fellow students, or anyone whom you feel comfortable publicly listing as a professional relationship. 

Once you have completed your portfolio, we recommend taking the following actions on LinkedIn: 

  1. Join a minimum of two groups.

  2. Engage in discussion forums, always in a professional manner.

  3. Collect and analyze data and trends you notice while viewing other people’s profiles.

  4. Ask for introductions through your design team to get connected to others and expand your network. But when you do, ensure you always network professionally and be sensitive to your first impression. 

  5. Grow your network by searching your email contacts and finding people you may know.

  6. See where alumni of your school are working and reach out to learn more about their company or industry. 

  7. Share updates with your network—such as interesting articles, links to videos or presentations. Consider the quality over quantity rule and ensure it is relevant to your audience and your own positioning. 

When engaged in these activities, remember your audience and the impact of a first impression on your reputation. Recognize that everything you say and do is a building block of your reputation. What you say or do either becomes an asset to get you where you want to go, or it’s a liability and becomes a barrier to achieving the Whole YOU. Consider LinkedIn as one giant room where influential and important people (e.g., your future boss) hang out to evaluate who they may want in the future on their team. If you really were in that room, you’d probably be super sensitive to how you look and what you say. Just because it’s digital, doesn’t mean it’s any less influential. In fact, every little thing you do in a digital world becomes even more influential to your reputation because it can follow you around for a long time. 

Click the button below for extra tips when using LinkedIn or go back to Module 7.