So if we've never met before, I'm Heather Austin from ProfessorAustin.com and
The Career Club on Facebook. If you're watching this recording
you've probably joined me already over on Facebook inside of The Career Club
and I provide solutions to help you with your career whether that's a career
transition or just finding a new job I know how difficult it can be to be in a
position that may not be fulfilling and to find a new position so I help people
with that as well so I have some slides prepared for you today so I'm going to
go ahead and put the slides up on the screen and I'm also going to be doing a
screen share so I got a lot of questions like always about LinkedIn so I'm gonna
actually be sharing my screen my my LinkedIn page with you to kind of show
you some things that will help you hopefully make a better LinkedIn profile
so let's go ahead and start with this first question so this comes from Jamie
so Jamie if you're here or if you're listening to this replay
hello Jamie submitted a question and she said after submitting an application is
it good to follow up if so when and how many excuse me when and how and then she
says many times the person responsible for hiring is unknown I loved when Jamie
Simmons this question because I get it all the time it's hard to know when you
submit an application and even a resume if you hear nothing back it's hard to
know how pushy should you be when should you respond when should you reach out my
recommendation is always to follow-up within a week so an email would be
appropriate to kind of reach out for the first that first line of contact would
just be to send a quick email you could say something like you know hey I hope
this email finds you well earlier this month or last week I submitted my resume
or application for this position and you would kind of talk about the position
talk about the company - and then you would say something like I'm very
excited to learn about this position and if you if you have some type of
connection with the position maybe somebody works for the company that you
know mention that in there so you're really just trying to do what you can to
stand out from from other applicants and kind of get your yourself to the top of
the employers mind and you also want to talk about in that email when you reach
out it's it's kind of like another way to say hey I'm a qualified candidate and
this is why and you mentioned your your expertise and your qualifications and
then and then you would go through and just you know at the end of that message
just say hey do you need anything else for me you know and make this a nice
professional message but an email within one week is a good a good practice to
follow another thing you could do is follow up with a phone call now I know
that Jamie mentioned that it's hard to find who's hiring for the position
my recommendation is always to jump on over to LinkedIn look at the company
most likely you'll see the positions listed that the company is hiring for
and then you can find a hiring manager if not find someone within the company
that you can contact or reach out to to get yourself in front of the right
person there's the famous saying you've all heard it before the squeaky wheel
gets the grease this is not the time to be bashful within reason you want to
make sure you're following up and I would say follow up every week for
probably two to three weeks maybe a month if you get to that point where
you're just not hearing back my recommendation would be to move on from
that but don't you know don't shy away from from really following through oh
and I do have I have a video that might help Jamie as well so this it would
actually be after the follow up happens in fact I'll go ahead and place this
video it's a link to how to follow up after your interview so I'm going to go
ahead and just place that in to the chat and that has some really good tips in
there as well so hopefully that helps Jamie that was a really good question
okay next question comes from Lauren so Lauren says what type of job do I focus
on my LinkedIn profile if I'm looking for customer service jobs and Social
Work jobs she says I'm neutral toward which one I obtain as a job so the
fantastic thing about your situation Lauren is that you're open to many
opportunities the disadvantage is that now you got to figure out how to tailor
your your LinkedIn profile and I'm going to also say your resume to what to each
position now one way you could go about your LinkedIn profile is you want to try
and focus as much as you can on transferable skills so I'm going to
share I'm going to actually share my my LinkedIn screen with you in just a
second here so you can see what I'm talking about
but transferable skills or they're also called exchangeable skills are skills
that would apply to both positions so again this would be written and verbal
communication leadership management customer service could even apply to
both of those teamwork is a big one organizational skills maybe you're good
with numbers or data so you want to focus on those types of skills for both
positions so things that the employer would really enjoy no matter what
position you're looking for now let me share I'm gonna share my screen with you
and I'm I'm hoping this is gonna work because I haven't done a screen share
with my with with I'm gonna share my my Firefox screen with you so give me just
a second here and I want to show you really quickly okay so this is my
LinkedIn profile and if I if I'm looking at my LinkedIn profile and I want to
focus on my skills or endorsements and things like that what I want you to do
for anyone Lauren and anyone else with this same question is scroll down your
LinkedIn page so this is my LinkedIn page now mine's gonna look different on
on my end because this is me looking at it as my page so it will look a little
bit different for you but if you scroll all the way to the bottom of your link
page you'll notice that you have the skills and endorsements section this is
where you actually want to go through and list those skills that will apply to
both positions now here's the cool thing at anytime you can click on add a new
skill and LinkedIn is actually going to recommend certain skills for you based
on what you've put in your profile so you could do it that way the other thing
you can do is if you just click on the pencil icon this shows you a number of
skills that you can and and these are all skills I've added to my own profile
you'll want to add the skills that that show you in the greatest light for the
position that you want to apply for now the top three skills you'll notice in
here will be the ones that you want to be known for and if I remember right
LinkedIn allows you to add 50 now I've only I only have 36 listed so kind of
think about how you want to do that you don't want to clutter it too much you
really want to stay focused on some of some of the the key skills that will
make you stand out in the position so I hope that that helps answer your
question okay let's jump back to our next question so that was from Lauren
this question is from from mala and she is very active in the career Club she
actually posted this question a while ago but I thought it was really
important to share because I get this question a lot so she says can you tell
me which industries or sectors and careers are showing stable progressive
growth so she really wants to know what what industries are growing right now
and she's get she's getting particular with like geopolitical analysis business
and information services so I'm gonna go back and I'm going to share my screen
with you again because I do have these are the resources that I shared with her
when she first asked me this question and it's really interesting to take a
look and see what is is really growing and Jess is here in the comments so
she's gonna go ahead and place these links for you so that you can pull them
up as well so if we look at the first one now I'm
I'm such a big fan of the Bureau of Labor Statistics so this is a resource
available to anyone and it mainly applies to the United States but but
really I think this can apply to anyone anywhere in the world because it can
kind of show you what occupations are on the rice so there's a few links in here
this first one is just the fastest growing occupations and if you scroll
down the list you'll notice it gives you the growth rate and it's same from 2016
to 20 2026 basically and if you just scroll down the home health aides are
in-demand personal care aides you'll see there's a lot in the health care
industry so if if you're looking at going into the healthcare industry now
is a really good time to do this and then also this is the cool thing is it
shows what the salary is so the median pay and this was 2017 it's going to
adjust a little bit as time goes on but this is the they don't have the
statistics yet for 2018 but for last year you can see like a physician's
assistant their median salary would be a hundred and four thousand per year so
one way when you're when you're actually deciding on what industry to go into and
I have a lot of clients and students that are in the same situation look at
what's on the trend or what's on the rise and if you need education or
special training what is that what is that going to cost you so you know if
you're if you have to go and you want to be a physician's assistant and you know
you're gonna end up making a hundred and four thousand dollars a year but yet
you're gonna come out of school with you know debt like two or three hundred
thousand dollars of debt does that make sense for you financially so you got it
you got to look at it and not in those terms as well now there's another link
in here I want to share and this is occupations with the most job growth so
it's a little bit different the cool thing about this is this also shows you
the 2016 and then it all shows you all the way up to 2026 what the outlook is
on that and then it shows you the median range per scuse me the median annual
wage so kind of look through this list and you know medical assistance that
looks like you know you have that's something to consider there's teacher
assistance in here financial assistance so this is really the the occupations
with the most job growth so Jess will place both of those links in the comment
section and you guys can look at that and just make make a determining basis
on is that something you might want to go so I'm glad that that maila an asked
that question okay let's jump over to our next question so our next question
comes from Alana Alana is also a big participant in our group their career
Club on Facebook so I loved one she asked this question and I told her that
I would actually discuss a little bit more in this Q&A session so she says I
was interviewed by both the ABC affiliates and PBS affiliates for ABC
they have a video and a written story about her interview for PBS they have an
audio and a written story she's wondering what should i do should I post
this on my LinkedIn profile she's like it seems like embedding code should be
should be used any tips so I want to show really quick Alana what I would do
if I were you so I'm gonna jump back to my LinkedIn screen again and when it
comes to when it comes to any interviews or any publications that you have of
yourself or any articles that were either written of you or articles that
you've written you want to share as much as you can out there you won't you want
to kind of gain that notoriety and that authority so one thing you can do
there's a couple there's actually a couple ways I'd like to put some of my
most popular videos or articles inside my profile so when I'm building out when
I'm helping someone build out a profile or I'm I'm kind of enhancing my own
profile inside the introduction section so I'm on LinkedIn and you can do this
on your own on you on site if I click on the little pencil
that is my intro area and I can scroll all the way down and this shows me the
media section so inside this media section you can upload documents photos
slides videos presentations notice that I've just uploaded a few of my videos
from YouTube so you you can do that and and that will make it so that if someone
comes to your LinkedIn profile they can see some of the things that you've done
now I wouldn't just do it there Ilana what I would actually do is if you go to
your newsfeed so I'm gonna just click on the home button at the top on my
newsfeed right here I can share an article a photo a video a document or an
idea now I recommend to anyone I know it's super scary at first when if you if
you're not used to posting on social media or even on LinkedIn because it's a
professional platform I recommend to anyone just start small so Ilana you
could say something like hey you know here's my recent interview with
so-and-so and this is what we talked about and and go ahead and post that
there now if I go I'm just gonna show you kind of some of the ideas so that
you can kind of get an idea for what I have posted recently so for me I was I
was on if anyone of you know on our onion she's fantastic she's amazing I
was on her podcast last week and I just shared it was so fun to spend some time
with Anna on her podcast discussing salary negotiation for women so
something super simple that's all I wrote it can just be a one sentence it
doesn't have to go into a lot of detail now the other thing you could consider
doing Alana is you could repurpose that content and you could put it into an
article so if you click on articles this will allow you to go in and actually
type an article so an article is going to be a little bit lengthy or a post is
just a quick item to share in your news feed and then don't be afraid to share
it multiple times so for example if I if I look at my post for example I think I
shared this last week I could also share it again
the week in case there there's people that
didn't see it you know you'll notice if you scroll
through your feed you'll have different views on your post so for example this
one only got 253 views if I scroll down I have another post that got 361 they
they all vary depending on how many people have liked or commented on your
post so just keep that in mind but definitely share it inside your profile
any of any important videos articles whatever it might be share that inside
your profile and also post it to your newsfeed and invite others to share it
as well in their newsfeed so really good question thanks for asking that one okay
last question here so this is from Michael and Michael just asked this the
other day he says how do I add bullet points and bold headlines in the summary
section on LinkedIn now I didn't mean for this whole Q&A section to be about
LinkedIn but I get so many questions about it that I thought I'm sure other
people are are wondering the same thing so I'm going to jump back to my LinkedIn
profile again and Michael is asking about the bullet point so when you go to
your profile and you're actually trying to create your profile let's just go to
the summary section since that's what he asked about there's really no way to add
bullet points like linkedin doesn't say well at least not that I I know of that
there they're increasing and changing their platform every day but there's
really no way to add bullet points into your profile anywhere and you want to
break up the content so it looks nice so I always recommend short sweet
paragraphs and then use those bullet points but this is what this is another
link that I shared with Michael and this is the it's just it's a quick little
article and there's probably even more up-to-date articles than this but I like
this one because it's really quick out of glance all you need to do if you want
to share a bullet point is you just copy and paste one of these symbols that's it
you don't have to do anything special so let's say I wanted to use this star I
would just highlight this star and do Coffee and then I would come back over
to my LinkedIn profile of course I need to edit my summary here and it could
also be in your work experience section too and I would just paste it right in
front of where I would want that bullet point to be so there's really no way to
actually add like a traditional bullet point but using resources on line like
this I really liked this article because there's so many like he has stars
copyrights subscripts and superscripts and subscripts checkmarks so on and so
forth so really there's the possibility of using bullet points are limitless now
I wouldn't go overboard I've seen some profiles that they just
jam-pack bullet these these random characters inside their headline in
their summary in their work experience keep it clean and sophisticated don't go
crazy but you know you could there's just there's so many there's so many
items that you could use so that's what I would do in terms of in terms of
bullet points so really quickly if you are here live or if you are listening to
this as the replay go ahead and comment down below what was your biggest
takeaway today what was the thing that really that you enjoyed learning the
most was it LinkedIn I know I talked a lot about LinkedIn or maybe it was the
job growth market so if you think about what positions are growing and I know
that's a question I get a lot or was it really how to follow up if you haven't
heard back from from applying for a position so go ahead and comment below
you