In this video, I will take you step-by-step on how to create your first profile, Linkedin for students. We’re going to be using the information from our first resume and using it to fill in some of the sections on Linkedin.
If you haven’t created your resume yet, check out the videos: how to write a resume for high school students or How to Write a resume For College Students. Once you have done that, you’ll be ready to create your Linkedin profile by using the information from your resume.
Let’s get started creating our Linkedin for students profile.
Walkthrough Video
Setting up your profile
There are a series of sections that you should fill out to complete your online professional profile. Once you have created your account by registering your email and creating your password, you can start adding information from your resume to your new Linkedin profile for students. Let’s take a quick look at our resume and the sections that we will be using from it.
Top Section
For the top section, start by adding your name.
Name: Philip Ches
Headline: We will copy our objective from our resume. Basically, this is what you’re looking for:
Passionate marketing and business student looking to put knowledge into practice and start a career in the marketing field.
Obviously, if you have another objective or something you would like to add as your headline, by all means. This one is just an example and one we borrowed from our resume.
Role: For Role, add your current position – Customer Service Agent
School: I’ll add Bachelor’s from UAlbany, but you should add your latest, most advanced level of education here.
Location: (your city) Schenectady, NY
Industry: Select your area of interest if you are just starting out.
Contact Info: For contact info, Make sure to add your phone number or email address here.
Picture: Make sure to select a professional picture of yourself to upload. Trust me, this is very important. You want your profile to standout from others. Having a high-quality picture makes a statement. So, use one!
Consider using a picture with good lighting, a snapshot of the face, and in business attire. You want to look professional.
Featured section:
For the Featured section, you can upload your own portfolio or other things you have done. Today, we’re going to upload our resume. You can use the same one you created in the other videos: how to write a resume for high school students or How to write a resume for college students.
Experience:
Great, now you’ve reached the experience section. Since you have already written your resume in the other follow along video, you can now copy that information here.
Let’s go ahead and copy it here for each position. If you have added extensive experience for each position in your resume, you won’t be able to add all of it in the Linkedin profile as there is a character limit.
Let’s look at how your experience from your resume would look on Linkedin.
Front Counter | Burger King
Feb 2019 – May 2020
- Provide excellent customer service to all customers by greeting them with a smile, cordially taking orders, and delivering what is requested every time.
- Serve customers with a smile and help guarantee a great meal experience by taking accurate orders.
- Assisted manager to on-board 2 new hires. Shadowed and trained new hires in working the front counter.
Lawncare
May 2018 – Present
- Currently take care of 4 neighbors’ lawns each 2X per month.
- Constantly aim to deliver a high-quality service and push for word of mouth recommendations. Acquired 2 new customers from my current clientele.
Education:
For the education section, I will address the different scenarios here. If you are in college, you can add your high school with the dates and then your current college experience along with the dates. If you are still in high school, add your high school start date and then add present. This means you are still in high school. If you have finished high school, but have not started college, add the dates that you attended high school.
Great, let’s add our education here. The way it appears here is exactly how it will appear on Linkedin.
Bachelor’s in International Relations
University of Albany
2015 – 2019
GPA:3.9
- Graduated with a 3.9 GPA
- Started an exchange student department and helped host 11 exchange students.
- Participated and later led the debate team.
Schenectady High School
2011 – 2014
Licenses or Certificates
Maybe you have taken some additional, extracurricular courses that gave you a certificate or license. Maybe you got certified proficient in Spanish from Instituto Cervantes, or maybe a certificate from a club you take part in, or maybe a music club, or maybe even a first aid course you’ve taken. You can add a series of awards/certificates, and licenses here. This is a pretty flexible section.
Also, once you are signed up with Linkedin, you can take occasional free Linkedin Learning courses. They have a great set of courses you can take advantage of and continue your learning.
Volunteer Experience
Let’s copy what we have from our resume for this section.
- City Mission – Soup Kitchen – Serving dinners 3 hours per week to 75+ people. 2016 – Present
- Salvation Army – Help box clothing to send to zones in need. 2014 – Present
- Mission Trip – 3 weeks in El Salvador helping reconstruct an orphanage after an earthquake. Worked with a team of 40 people helping lay bricks. 2012 – 1 month.
Skills
For the skills section, add things like courses, software, languages, and other skills you have. We’re going to copy over the information from our resume for this.
- Spanish – Fluent
- Adobe Photoshop – proficient
- Camtasia – Strong user
- Youtube video editing – strong
- Microsoft Office – Proficient
Ok, now that we have added these, as you start connecting with your network, they can endorse you for these skills. This helps make your profile more relevant especially for these skills mentioned.
Recommendations
Recommendations come from other people, so we don’t have anything to add here. However, once you have finished your profile, you might consider pinging one of your teachers or other people you know. Consider picking people that know of your skills, character, work ethic, and can attest to it.
Recommendations go a long way. Remember, on most resumes, you are not including a recommendation letter unless requested, so most of the time, recruiters won’t see the great things your recommenders have written about you.
On Linkedin, it is the opposite, anyone who visits your profile will be able to view your recommendations. So, one more tip here, don’t just select any person to give you a recommendation. Make sure it is someone who knows you well. For more information on requesting recommendation letters, check out the video on requesting reference letters.
Interests
You might want to follow specific companies, individuals, businessmen/women, or certain areas of work like digital marketing, product management, engineering, medicine etc. Following these companies lets you get updates on what the company is doing, business opportunities, and even job opportunities, which is probably the most interesting for job searchers.
Activity section
- This shows the content that you have recently shared. If you are looking to get a job in let’s say Customer Service, you should consider reading reputable articles about customer service and then sharing these articles on your timeline. Just click start a post and copy the link there.
- The more you share, the more your profile will get visibility and hits.
Visit The Profile We Just Created Together
LinkedinCareerPrepDemo
SlideShare: Linkedin Profile For Students
Linkedin For Students Wrap up
Great, we have finished what we set out to do, create a Linkedin profile by using your resume. From here, you can go ahead and start searching for your connections and adding them. Also, you can start searching for available jobs in your area or area of interest. In an upcoming video, you will learn specific tips on how to job search with Linkedin.
If you have any questions on how to create your Linkedin profile for students, please feel free to add a comment below.
Best of luck on your job search!
