Tell the World the Work you Want
And list only the work experience that helps you get it
Every semester, I assign my Engineering Business Practices students to complete profiles on the professional networking site, LinkedIn.
Many of my students groan.
Although you might think that today’s students understand how to use social media and digital networking because they’ve been raised on tablets, smartphones since before they could even read… you’d mostly be wrong.
LinkedIn remains a mystery to many students, and in a way, it’s not their fault. They’ve been told their entire adult lives that they must have a resume, and that their resume most conform to certain rote expectations, or they’ll never get a job.
That’s too narrow-minded.
As I wrote in Hire for Aptitude, Pay for Performance and in Understand Personality To Redesign Team Relationships, hiring practices are changing — especially at the most innovative technology firms for whom many of my students want to work. For example, the job application process is increasingly automated, meaning that resumes are fed through character recognition readers that search for keywords and sort applicants into those unworthy of further screening, and those that might be worthy of additional scrutiny. Those students that…
