During the last job club session at Birmingham Settlement in Aston that I attended I worked with Abigail, who had recently graduated from university and described herself as ‘an aspiring teacher looking to find experience to do a PGCE‘.
Teachers have to be particularly careful using online social networks, as it’s not only employers who might take an interest in their online profiles but students and their parents as well, as this Daily Mail story about a group of primary school teachers whose hen night party photos were circulated locally by an ‘appalled’ parent illustrates.
Unfortunately the guidance UK schools offer to their teachers on this varies wildly – many do not yet have a social networking policy. As Karl Hopwood, an internet safety consultant and former head, said to The Guardian:
“I work in a lot of schools all over the country and I see very different approaches to this type of thing – from schools who have actually told teachers that they cannot have a Facebook account, to others who haven’t even given it a thought. Similarly, you find schools where staff are friends with pupils on Facebook.”
It’s often up to teachers and those wanting to teach to have an awareness of the risks and how best to manage these themselves. Many will find the website facebookforeducators.org helpful.
With these issues in mind Abigail and I looked at her current online profile. Abigail Googled herself and, as she has a rather unusual name, her Facebook page and Twitter account came back at the top of the first page of results.
First we looked at Abigail’s Facebook profile, selecting ‘View as…’ to see what a ‘non-friend’ could view (see this Digital Skills Network how-to video if you’d like to do the same). Abigail had already done this and tweaked her privacy settings accordingly, so she was happy with the few details that were publicly available about her. We spoke about the need to do this regularly, to keep a check on her public-facing profile and make sure nothing had ‘slipped through the net’.
Next we viewed Abigail’s Twitter account. Abigail was quite surprised that this was so easy to find with a simple Google search for her name and she hadn’t really considered the implications of this being a public-facing profile in the same way she had with Facebook. Abigail uses Twitter to talk to her friends in a very chatty and informal way, using a lot of abbreviations, ‘text-speak’ and emoticons. Of course, this is absolutely fine for what she is using Twitter for but as a public online profile it didn’t look particularly professional – in Jobvite’s recent Social Recruiting Survey more than half of the recruiters polled said they’d react negatively to a spelling or grammatical error in someone’s profile. With this in mind, Abigail opted to protect her tweets, meaning people she hasn’t authorised to follow her can only see her profile picture and bio and can’t view her tweets.
After Abigail had looked at what was publicly available about her online and taken steps to keep her more personal details and posts private, we started to talk about projecting a more professional face online and creating a profile that could support her in her search for work that she would be happy for potential employers to view. I took Abigail through the initial steps of creating a profile on the LinkedIn network. Being a regular Facebook and Twitter user, she very quickly got the hang of LinkedIn’s look and feel and built up a profile in no time at all. I asked Abigail what she thought of LinkedIn and how she envisaged using it:
I found that very interesting. I wasn’t aware of LinkedIn before I came here. I’d heard of it but I wasnt too sure what it was about. But obviously I’ve found out some valuable information and I’ve managed to set up my own profile with a picture.
I think I’m going to use it to network, find some opportunities and basically find people who’ve got similar kind of interests or organisations that I can get a job with.
Before the end of the session I took Abigail through creating a customised LinkedIn URL and she secured the URL ‘linkedin.com/in/fullname‘ for herself, which she can put on her CV and in emails to potential employers. It also means this professional online profile now ranks very highly in a Google search for Abigail’s name, coming second in between her more ‘locked-down’ Facebook and Twitter profiles.
In terms of assessing one’s online profile with job-hunting in mind, it’s always good to think not only in terms of what details you want to keep private and what you don’t want a potential employer to see, but also what you want to be known about you and what you do want an employer to discover. LinkedIn is great for building a profile that clearly lays out your skills, experience, qualifications and what you have to offer a workplace. It also ranks very highly in Google searches, so one of the first things anyone curious doing an online search for your name will see is your ‘professional face’ to the world.
To get started with LinkedIn see our video guide Introducing LinkedIn and follow our step-by-step guide to Create a LinkedIn profile.
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To hear my full interview with Abigail, listen to the audioboo below:
