Are You Leveraging LinkedIn for Future Career Advancement?

Are you leveraging LinkedIn for your healthcare IT career growth? If you’re not, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. In case you haven’t visited it recently, LinkedIn is so much more than your online resume. Sure, it’s still your online resume and you should leverage that aspect of LinkedIn for your career, but you can get so much more out of LinkedIn if you spend your time right. In a recent conference session I did, I quickly realized that many didn’t understand the full benefits of what LinkedIn could offer their career.

Here’s a look at a few other areas of LinkedIn you can use to benefit your career:
Groups – If you’re not taking part in some high quality LinkedIn groups, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to learn and connect with your peers. There are some really great groups. In fact, too many to choose from in healthcare IT. Get in some and start participating in discussions. You’ll be surprised how this online networking will connect you to so many great people.

Blogs – While you can feature your knowledge and skills in the comments of LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn blogs are a great way to show deeper expertise on a topic. It takes some real effort to put together a high quality blog post. Plus, putting together the posts often requires you to up your game in order to be able to blog about the topic. It’s a powerful concept. LinkedIn blogs are great also, because there’s no expectation of consistency. You might post regularly or not. That’s ok. Plus, by posting your blogs on LinkedIn you have a built in audience of connections that can read what you post.

Profile – Don’t transgress your profile. Make sure it’s up to date and reflects your skills and expertise. It doesn’t take much to keep it up to date. Just check it every once in a while and make sure nothing has changed or needs to be added.

Connections – There are a lot of chances to add people to LinkedIn. Maybe you met them at a local conference or event. Be sure to add them as a connection. Building and expanding those connections will help you in your long term career efforts.

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for business and your career. Consistently leveraging some of these areas will be a great benefit to your career advancement.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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