Why college students should join LinkedIn right now.

Written By Rahul Pandey

If you’re a college student and still think that LinkedIn is not for you, perhaps, you’re making the biggest mistake of your career.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networking platforms can’t offer you career opportunities that LinkedIn offers. With over 500 million professionals from worldwide, LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking platform.

Various entrepreneurs use this platform to find potential candidates like you for partnership. Many potential recruiters are just wandering on LinkedIn in search of the best candidate for the job.

If these things intrigue you and made you change your mindset about LinkedIn then I think you should read this article entirely. You’ll come to know more benefits that you were about to miss.

5 reasons why college students should be active on LinkedIn

In this roundup, I’ll present you some satisfactory reasons that might excite you to join LinkedIn right now to leverage its power for your career opportunities.

If you’re ready, let’s begin.

1. Connects with college alumni.

LinkedIn helps you connect with your school/college alumni by offering Alumni Tool. You can view your school/college/university alumni by visiting the page where you’ll see the “Alumni” tab in the left sidebar.

Using this tool, you can see where your alumni live, where they work, what they do, how you are connected and more. Having this knowledge, you can make connections and establish meaningful communication with them for career guidance.

Alumni tool also tells you what alumni studied and what they are skilled at that made them what they are nowadays.

Basically, LinkedIn offers a powerful tool that can help students make their career and academic choices based on the alumni’s data. If you’re a college student or recent graduate, make sure you take advantage of Alumni Tool to explore possible career and academic paths.

2. Cultivates your Professional network.

If you’re a student, LinkedIn is the best among all networking sites to nurture your professional network. Not only, it helps you connect with your college alumni but also with top professionals of the industry you want to be part of.

You can find and connect with recruiters and executives from the company you want to join after graduation. Also, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you can reach other successful entrepreneurs as your mentor for setting up your very first startup.

This way you can cultivate a strong professional network that can help you grow your career or business when you first step into the market. Having potential connections on LinkedIn can help you connect all the dots spread all the way for a successful career.

3. Helps you develop new skills.

LinkedIn Learning, a premium e-learning portal offered by the LinkedIn itself, helps you develop your skills to the professional level by industry experts. It also suggests you most in-demand skills that you’ll need for better opportunities in your industry.

Being skilled in various management and technical skills is the best thing that a student or professional can acquire in order to succeed in academics and career. So you should make sure to take advantage of this powerful service to enhance your skills.

4. Internship & Job Opportunities.

LinkedIn offers great tools to help you find job and internship opportunities. You can check out company pages or search results to uncover opportunities in your career field and area of interest.

Usually, recruiter and human resource executives use LinkedIn to reach out the best talents for the job. So, isn’t it is a good idea to use the same platform to showcase your skills and connect with them for internship and job opportunities? Of course, it is.

You can navigate to LinkedIn Jobs portal to find the best available jobs for you. Then apply for the most relevant job you find there. Also, you can change experience level to internship to find internship opportunities available in your field of study.

5. Arsenal of Contents and Knowledge.

LinkedIn allows users to share varieties of contents including videos. It also provides a content publishing platform on which users love to publish long-form articles on various aspects of their respective industry.

If you follow influencers related to your industry and having active connections, your LinkedIn feed will be full of amazing contents. It is a great source of updated industry-relevant information, tips and opinion of industry experts on various aspects.

Also, people use to share their corporate experience, entrepreneurial lessons and lots of real-life experiences that may help you deal with your problems easily. So make sure you regularly check your LinkedIn feed and grasp informative lessons from it.

Wrapping up

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social sites are great platforms for entertainment purpose. But, if you’re a student and want to establish lasting communication with top industry professionals, LinkedIn is the best platform to get started.

If you’re not available on LinkedIn yet, I strongly recommend you to create your profile right now to create your online presence on one of the best professional networking platforms on the web.

And, if you already exist on LinkedIn, please encourage your fellow mates too for creating their presence on LinkedIn. Also, share this article to those who don’t find LinkedIn useful for students and let them know what they are missing.

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Why college students should join LinkedIn right now.