LinkedIn

As seasonal hiring for outdoor educators draws to a close, we thought it’d be a good idea to share why it’s so important that outdoor educators use LinkedIn.

If you’re unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it’s a professional networking website that allows its members to create and maintain online profiles with resume-like features, including job history, certifications, professional affiliations, recommendations from coworkers and previous employers, awards, educational history, and much more.

For employers, LinkedIn offers a place to post job openings and paid advertisements, and to search for potential employees. There’s a lot more to the site than that, but for the purposes of today’s post, that’s what you need to know.

With about 300 million registered users, LinkedIn has become the default online tool for professional networking. In the United States alone, around 93 million people are using LinkedIn. So don’t think for a minute that just because you work in outdoor education — where we’re known for bucking trends and ignoring technology — that LinkedIn doesn’t matter. Anytime a website attracts nearly 30 percent of the adult population, it matters!

Here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education, we’re just as likely to search for an applicant’s online profile as we are to call for references. In other words, we take this hiring thing pretty seriously, and if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, well, that just makes us question how serious a professional you are. Think about it: Just because we’re hiring you to hike, climb, raft and guide doesn’t mean you’re not to be taken seriously.

So how should you use LinkedIn? For starters, you want to (more…)