Hey folks and welcome to the Grad School Sucks podcast, the show for grad students and academics who want to start a non academic career. I'm your host Dr. Matt Carlson and today I'm going to talk about three quick LinkedIn profile tips for PhDs who are wanting to go industry and get a non academic job.
But first before that I want to tell you About three things that I'm grateful for, and explain why this podcast is coming out a little bit late. But even before that, I want to let you know that I have an upcoming live workshop in about two or three weeks. It'll be Tuesday, December 12th. At 7 p. m.
Eastern, I'm going to be talking about how to start your industry career. I'm going to talk through my story of how I got my first industry job. I'm going to jump into some quick tips, some strategies, and the actual steps it takes for PhDs and grad students to start their academic, to start their industry career.
And then I'm going to be talking about some career paths that you can take. To get to a six figure income in industry, and then I'm going to be answering your questions live, and we're doing some live Q& A to wrap things up. I would love to see you there. The last webinar that I did had over a hundred people attend live.
It was a great time, got a lot of good discussion in there, and I think it really helped some people along the way towards their first industry job. So let's jump right into gratitude. This episode was actually supposed to come out about five days ago. If you've been following the podcast for a while, you know that I've been releasing episodes on Wednesdays for at least a couple months at this point.
And the reason this episode is late is related to the first thing that I'm grateful for. And that is... Usually, my tech stuff works really well. So if you're a content creator, or you do anything like this, or even you just join Zoom meetings, you know that tech stuff can be a pain in the ass, and sometimes it just doesn't go right.
And frankly, for me, for most of the time, it goes really well. I've put money into some good equipment, and I pay good money to use some good software, and most of the time I don't have an issue. However... Last week, I did run into something. I don't know exactly what happened, but the file that I created for the podcast got corrupted, and so when Wednesday came, I had nothing to provide to everyone, and my son was already home from school, and it was busy, busy with family, so I didn't get back to the podcast until today, when I'm releasing this episode.
Still, I'm thankful that this rarely happens. I've been podcasting a little bit over a year at this point, and I think I've only run into significant issues with maybe 3 or 4 episodes. And I think we're around episode 80 at this point, so that's about 1 in 20. It's not a bad ratio if you ask me. So I'm thankful that for the most part my tech works really well.
So here's two quick other things that I'm grateful for. One, I'm grateful for my career path that has brought me to where I am today. I'm glad I got to go to grad school, even though I don't think it may have necessarily been the best choice for a future career for me. I think that it did prepare me in many ways.
It taught me things like statistics, it taught me project management, I got leadership opportunities that I might not have gotten elsewhere, and I got to help a population that I really felt called to help during that period of time, and frankly I think that was a great way to spend my 20s.
I'm also thankful. That I'm not there anymore. I'm thankful I'm not in grad school, I'm not in academia, and now I have a job in industry that is much more balanced, I guess, if I could say it that way. My career is still about helping the poor, because I work in healthcare, in a company that facilitates healthcare through the Medicaid system.
But the work life balance that I have now is much better than I had in academia, particularly as a grad student. The pay is better, and frankly, I just feel better day in and day out. And especially being a parent, I think that the career that I have now is just so synergistic with my life as a parent and wanting something a little more balanced.
for my own mental health. I am very grateful for where I am today. The last thing that I want to say that I'm thankful for is you. The viewer, the listener, however you choose to consume my content, I am grateful to be able to speak to you because I know whether you're a grad student or an academic, it's a stressful life.
There's a lot to do, there's a lot to accomplish, there's a lot to learn, and going industry is just like one more thing. on the stack of things that you need to get to. And even though you're busy, you chose to put time into listening to this podcast or consuming my content on Instagram or LinkedIn.
And I just want to say that I'm grateful that you choose to spend some time consuming the content that I create and learning how to better your career in GoIndustry. All right, so those are the three things that I'm grateful for. Let's jump into the content for today.
Here are three quick LinkedIn profile tips. Three very quick tips. You can do these in under 10 minutes. Here we go. Quick tip number one is to spruce up your on your LinkedIn profile. Now I don't actually mean your profile picture. That should be a professional headshot with a plain background with you looking at least business casual.
I mean the other photo, the photo above your profile picture. It's that Rectangular one at the top of your page, I believe it's called a banner photo or a background photo. And a lot of people either leave this blank or they get something generic off the internet and throw it up there. Or they have something really big.
Bizarre and personal that I don't think is something a recruiter would really care to see so here's the way to address That photo you can find free templates over at canva canva. com canva and You can literally just download these templates or you can fill them out put in your information and download them And they have a lot of great options and frankly They look professional.
A lot of them actually match specific career types, whether you go into teaching, or data, or something project management, or something in tech. They have different kinds that will kind of fit the persona of, That professional and so I highly encourage you to think about going over to Canva and looking at their free templates and downloading one or filling out your information on it and downloading it and uploading it to your LinkedIn profile.
It's a very easy way to add just a little extra polish to your LinkedIn page. Alright, the next quick tip number two is your headline. Now your headline in your LinkedIn profile is. The kind of like one liner form right underneath your name. So it's got your profile picture, your name, and then your headline right underneath that.
And the two tips that I have for how to use that space are, One, think about SEO. And two, think about branding. So for number one, SEO, if you think about how recruiters find you on LinkedIn, they will find you by either you apply to a job or they go seek you out. And the way that recruiters typically seek out people on LinkedIn is literally they type into the search bar the job title that they want to fill, because of course they would want to fill a job with someone who's had that job before.
That is a great safe bet for them. And so you want to position yourself to Be in the path of recruiters who are looking to fill a job title and so what you actually want to do is you want To put that job title in your headline And what it will do is it will bring you up in the search rankings whenever recruiters go to search for someone with that job Title and you will get much more visibility to recruiters that way the second thing to do with your headline is to think of it as a branding thing and one concept that is Often talked about in branding and marketing is know, like, and trust.
And so this is kind of a ladder that you lead people up over time. And a great example is actually this, this content right here. So you probably came to know me through either finding me on the internet, on Instagram, or LinkedIn, or YouTube, and then you decided to Engage with some of my content, maybe some more of my long form content and maybe along that way you came to like what I was saying and then maybe you'll hear something like the pitch at the beginning to attend my next live workshop and you decide, hey, I'm going to trust this guy with my email.
I'm going to trust him with a little bit more time because I want to see what else he has to offer. And that is the know, like, trust ladder. And you should be doing that for recruiters. So, recruiters will find out about you through your resume, and they'll come to like you through looking at your LinkedIn profile.
And the way you do that is you want to have them spend more and more time looking at your profile. And so what you do is you're going to brand yourself in your headline. You're not just going to talk about, or you're not just going to have the job title that you want, but you're going to add a one liner at the end.
that tells a little bit more and intrigues them into learning more about you. A good headline might be for someone in my position working in data in the healthcare industry, I might put something like, Healthcare Data Analyst, dash, I use healthcare to ensure that Everyone gets the healthcare needs met that they have or something to that effect, right?
You could workshop it, come up with three or five different one liners and end up with something really great and compelling. And what that does is it convinces a recruiter that you're interesting and that they want to learn more about you. So they'll scroll down your page a little bit more to your about section, which is the next thing we'll talk about.
And maybe they'll even go further down to your experiences section, which we're not going to talk about today. The longer you get a recruiter to spend time on your LinkedIn profile, the more likely they are to call you about a job. So let's talk about this last tip. So once you get that headline prepped with that SEO component and the branding component, you get the recruiter to scroll down a little bit more to that about section.
So I'm not going to go into everything. That we could talk about with your about section, but this should be where you really give a sales pitch as to who you are and what you do. It could be a couple sentences long. It could be a couple paragraphs long. I recommend you find another PhD in industry who has the job title that you want and look at their about section.
Look at how they frame themselves. Look at how much space they take up. And then look at a couple different profiles to get a sense of what you could put there. But basically what you want to accomplish is you want to talk about what you bring to the table, the experiences you've had, and why you're a good fit for the kind of job position that you're trying to get.
But the quick tip that I want to point out here is in the About section, you get to highlight five skills. Now your Skills section is actually in a different part of your LinkedIn profile, much further down the page. And chances are recruiters will probably never get down there because they're just not going to scroll all the way down.
And the, but you get the opportunity to put your top 5 skills right in front of the recruiter in your about section. So the quick tip is to look at the job listings for the kinds of jobs that you want. And Cross examine to see what kind of skills they have listed in their required sections. It could be something like data analytics, maybe project management, maybe leadership skills.
Whatever it is, these are the skills that you want to put in your top five. And that will serve a couple purposes. One, It'll allow you to rank a little bit higher for recruiters whenever you apply for jobs and your top skills match the job that you're applying for. But two, it'll also visually show recruiters when they look at your About section what your top five skills are.
And if they match what the recruiter is looking for, then hey, that is a good match made for them. And so they're probably going to be even more... Compelled to give you a call. So those were your three tips go to canva and check out a good background photo Hack your headline and incorporate both an SEO component as well as a little bit of a branding sentence at the end.
And then for your about section, do not forget your top five skills. Make sure they match the job descriptions and the job postings that you are applying to. Alright, that is all I have for you today. My apologies for getting this episode out so late and be sure to Sign up for my upcoming live workshop.
I will have a link in the description of this episode, whether it's on the podcast or on YouTube. Again, I'll be talking for about an hour with you all on Tuesday, December 12th at 7pm. I'll be talking about how to start your industry career. Alright, that is all I have for you. I will see you all actually in a couple days when I release The usual episode on Wednesday.
It'll be an interview episode with a buddy that I've made a PhD in industry. It's going to be a great conversation. See you all then.