One of the standard themes that I emphasize to people who are looking for jobs or starting their careers is the importance of building and maintaining a professional online presence, although this is also a core practice throughout one’s career. I continue to be a bit shocked when recent graduates have little or no professional online presence. The first step is to build a profile on LinkedIn or a presence on GitHub (if that is relevant in your field). This is as far as many young people go. And, of course, it is important to build a LinkedIn network that includes professionally-relevant people and not just your peers. If LinkedIn is just an online resume for you, you are missing out. As a job seeker, it is incredibly important to think about what someone finds when they Google your name. Your online presence is a way for you to demonstrate what you are all about and what you can offer. I sometimes use the following metaphor. Imagine that you want to buy a car. When you look online, you only find a plain text document with bullet points listing each car’s features. Absurd, right? So why do people think that a resume or bullet point list of education, job experience, etc. will be sufficient in motivating the value of their human capital? Let’s cut to the chase. When you are seeking a job, you are selling your ability to add value to an organization. Nobody sells anything with just a page of bullet points.
In the past, I have suggested to young professionals that it is a good idea to create a website that they curate over time to show their past work, what they are good at, what they love, what motivates them, etc. I have seen great examples where someone has both professional and non-professional interests on their websites. Interesting people are, well, interesting. Someone who has had a period of being a professional slack liner, prior to entering data science, is intriguing, right? I still think a website is a very good idea, but there are a range of good alternatives if that doesn’t speak to you. Simply put, when someone looks you up online, you want them to get a sense of who you are and what you contribute. Your web presence is your portfolio.
With this in mind, here are some valuable ways to build an online presence that shows what you can do:
- Demonstrate Your Abilities
- Build Your GitHub Repository (aka repo)
- Write Blog Posts
- Maintain An Online Portfolio Of Past Work
- Be Part Of Communities of Practice
- Comment Or Post On LinkedIn
- Be Helpful On Sites Like Stack Overflow, Quora, etc.
Don’t tell the world what you are good at–show the world what you are good at. In tech and analytic fields, GitHub has become a great way to do this. Write blog posts that demonstrate that you are thoughtful about your field. If you are a writer or artist, it is very important to maintain a well-organized and curated online portfolio of your work. Ideally, as a content creator, you will maintain links to multiple places that have published your content.
Another great way to add to your online presence is to participate in communities of practice. At the most basic level, commenting on posts on LinkedIn that are relevant to your peers is great. Similarly, posting on LinkedIn or X about news, new research, events or articles that your network will find interesting will keep your name in front of your community. There are many other online communities of practice, such as forums. By contributing to these forums, you get to show what you know, as well as demonstrating that you communicate clearly. Sites that specifically focus on questions and answers, such as Quora and Stack Overflow, provide a great way to build social capital by by being helpful. StackExchange.com hosts 183 different Q&A communities.
Wrapping up, I hope that I have motivated why it is so important for job seekers, in particular, to have maintain an interesting and dynamic online presence. Especially for people in the early years of their careers, when they do not yet have deep professional networks, this is very valuable.
Geoff Considine on Finance and Economics 