Many people who aren't actively looking for a job or career change mistakenly believe that they don't need LinkedIn. I disagree. I believe LinkedIn is the platform for every professional to showcase his or her abilities, skills, areas of expertise, and levels of education. Even if you aren't actively looking for a change, you never know when a recruiter or hiring manager may be looking for someone just like you.
Learn from this episode of Teachers in Transition why Kitty Boitnott, a Heart-Centered Career Transition and Job Search Coach, believes that LinkedIn is a platform you cannot overlook or ignore.
Also, learn about how you can use PhotoFeeler.com to get free feedback on the best headshot you should use for your profile.
If you would like to connect with Kitty on LinkedIn, please feel free to go to http://linkedin.com/in/kittyboitnott to offer a connection request.
A transcript of this podcast is available at http://bit.ly/2OhgpSY.
Many people who aren't actively looking for a job or career change mistakenly believe that they don't need LinkedIn. I disagree. I believe LinkedIn is the platform for every professional to showcase his or her abilities, skills, areas of expertise, and levels of education. Even if you aren't actively looking for a change, you never know when a recruiter or hiring manager may be looking for someone just like you.
Learn from this episode of Teachers in Transition why Kitty Boitnott, a Heart-Centered Career Transition and Job Search Coach, believes that LinkedIn is a platform you cannot overlook or ignore.
Also, learn about how you can use PhotoFeeler.com to get free feedback on the best headshot you should use for your profile.
If you would like to connect with Kitty on LinkedIn, please feel free to go to http://linkedin.com/in/kittyboitnott to offer a connection request.
A transcript of this podcast is available at http://bit.ly/2OhgpSY.
Are you a teacher who's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition.", This is Kitty Boitnott of"Teachers in Transition," the Podcast and YouTube Channel and the company,"Teachers in Transition"and Boitnott Coaching. Today I want to talk about a career transition strategy. Last week I talked about a stress management strategy and I alternate each week between either stress management or career transition. So this week the topic is LinkedIn. Do you need a LinkedIn profile or not? And I would suggest that yes you do. Whether you are actively looking for work or not, I recommend that every professional individual have some sort of LinkedIn presence and that presence needs to be more than just a profile that's been set up. An account that's been set up and abandoned, which is what my clients tell me often happens with them. Teachers in general have been slow to adopt LinkedIn because if they were happy in their work, they thought they didn't need LinkedIn. What's the point? You don't need it unless you're looking for work or you're working in business and you're mobile enough to be changing jobs pretty frequently. That's been the impression that a lot of teachers have and perhaps other people too that unless you're actively looking for work, you don't need LinkedIn, and I want to recommend to you that you don't have to be actively looking for work to benefit from having an up-to-date fully completed, optimized LinkedIn profile. Recruiters are looking at LinkedIn every single day. HR directors and hiring managers are looking on LinkedIn every single day. They're looking for people with certain very specific skills, abilities, experience, and education. And if you're a third grade teacher, you may be thinking, well, yeah, okay, fine. Nobody's working for a third grade teacher and that's not true, probably. Because of the impending teacher shortage that's arriving across the country and districts are having trouble finding enough people to open school with all of their positions fill. You may be in high demand as a third grade teacher. Let's say that you've been playing with the idea of not wanting to be a third grade teacher for a whole lot longer. Maybe you're okay with going back this year but you'd like to think that maybe this year is your last year. You are disenchanted or disillusioned with teaching and you want to be available for some other kind of career. The issue is for most of my clients is that they come to me with a very um, limited view of what's even available to them. They haven't really explored all the possibilities that might be available to someone with a four-year degree, even if that degree is in education, and they haven't considered what they might be able to do as far as transferring skills that they've learned over time as an educator into other professional arenas. I want to suggest to you that there are many possibilities. You just have to be open to them and you have to be in a position and a mindset to be ready to explore them. LinkedIn can provide you with an opportunity to make yourself available without actively undertaking a job search. If you've set up your profile correctly, you've made yourself searchable and you're using keywords or phrases that are um, related to the job or career that you're interested in transitioning into in the future, then you set yourself up for the possibility of a recruiter finding you and calling you to ask you would you be interested in this particular opportunity? And honestly, I don't know anybody who would turn down the possibility of listening to some opportunity that might be presented. Now, if you're skeptical and you don't believe that recruiters are out there calling people all the time or reaching out to them through email, you just need to take my word for it. My clients get calls like that all the time once they properly set up their LinkedIn profile. Now, in fairness, my clients are actively looking to make a change. But what I'm suggesting to you is that whether you're actively looking or not, you need to update and keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date and optimized so that you can be ready for an opportunity that may come along. Now, I'm limited because I'm talking on a podcast as well as the youtube channel today and I optimally, I would like to show you where you need to pay attention to your LinkedIn profile. I'm not going to be able to do that on a podcast, but let me offer that. If you would like to see examples of an example of a fully optimized LinkedIn profile, you're welcome to look at mine. In fact, you're welcome to send me a connection request to say,"Hey Kitty, I've listened to your podcast. I'd like to connect with you on LinkedIn." I'd love to connect with you. I'm open to connecting with individuals who are interested in this information or any other information that I may be able to share. So, take a look at mine at LinkedIn at Kitty Boitnott. I'm the only Kitty Boitnott on LinkedIn, although I'm not the only Kitty Boitnott out there, believe it or not. So look for Kitty Boitnott, and you'll find me and you'll see in the upper section of, and I'm using my hands for the YouTube folks. You can't see me doing that on the podcast that I'm talking about, the upper section of your LinkedIn profile. There are three specific areas that you need to pay attention to. One is your headshot. That may be the most important one. You need an updated photo. You need to look professional. You need to be looking directly into the camera and you need to have the shot to be from your shoulders up, not a full body shot, and not a shot of you and your spouse on your wedding day. Nothing with you playing on the beach. Keep those pictures for Facebook. Your LinkedIn headshot should be just that: a h eadshot. You should be looking directly into the camera. You should be smiling and looking friendly. If you're not sure whether your picture is appropriate for LinkedIn, use a tool c alled PhotoFeeler.com"p h o t o Dot. No. photo"p h o t o feeeler(fe e l e r.)com." Oh, now that I think about it might be that co. Try"co" A s well. I'll put it in the notes, the correct l ane. Once you've gotten, as you set up a free account with PhotoFeeler, you're asked to give your feedback on a certain number of other people's h ead s hots. Now you can select for fun or social or for business or LinkedIn,so select the LinkedIn. For this particular exercise, after you've had a chance to look at and give your feedback on the certain number of other people's headshots, you'll be allowed an opportunity to upload your own headshot. And after about 24 hours, you'll get feedback from people who will tell you anonymously how you score on a, on a domain of, uh, three, three particular domains,"likeability, influence and competence." And it's a scale of one to three. So you might see a 1.5 and one area, a 2.7 in another area, and a 2.5 and another. If you come up low on the likeability score, get another photo taken, that's more important even than competence a nd influential. So, be aware that you need a relatively high a above a two, if you can for l ikability so that you can feel confident that the photo that you're presenting on LinkedIn makes you work approachable. People want to be able to envision you being part of their team, you being somebody they l ike to be around. That's why you need to look likable. Okay? Now for the g entleman, you need to wear a sports jacket I believe, a white or blue shirt and a complimentary tie. Make sure that you've had a recent haircut and that you look well-groomed. Look into the camera and smile for you ladies. Dress however you would ordinarily dress for work and um, think in terms of a professional level job, not something casual. And then take a little extra time with your hair, a little extra time with your makeup. If you don't ordinarily wear makeup, that's fine, but a little bit of mascara and a little bit of rouge can go a long way. Little powder perhaps to take shine, shine off. So look your best. Have a friend take picture you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for a professional headshot. Get a friend to take a picture in a good light, not in a yellow lit room. Make sure that light is bright and white. You can go outside as long as you're not squinting in the sun. Stand in front of the hedge. Boom. You've got a great picture. That's your headshot. The other area behind your headshot is some people call it a banner. Some people call it, call it a cover. On Facebook, it's, it's your cover, it's the longer, more rectangular section of a, and then on LinkedIn it's automatically a generic sort of aqua blue with little dots on it that look a little like a matrix or I'm not quite sure what they're supposed to represent, but that's the generic, background that everybody gets. What you want to do is change that and put in something more personal. A photo that you took at the beach. Not a lot of you playing on the beach necessarily, but a serene beach scene or a mountain range or a countryside or a beautiful, uh, building of some sort. You know, recently I had a client who used an academic building to represent his higher education background. So select something that represents you and upload that. Now. Also make sure that it's a picture that you own outright, that you don't, you don't need to be paying somebody for because you don't want to get dinged with a bill for using the picture that didn't belong to you, preferably a picture you upload from your own camera. Uh, and then they, uh, the third section I want you to pay attention to is the headline, which are the 120 characters that come directly below your name in that top section of LinkedIn. You can manually change that headline and you need to do that. Now the way to change all of these things is when you're in your LinkedIn profile, you'll see pencils at different points on the screen and you'd click double click on the pencil to be taken into the back end of your LinkedIn profile where you can make all of these changes and the headline is going to be offered to you where you can type in keywords that represent what you would like to be doing or what you're already an expert or have a specialty in. Or you can create a value statement or proposition statement which is what a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs do. For example, my statement that comes there to keep using my hands comes directly below my name on my LinkedIn profile it says"I help burned out teachers, reignite their passion and redirect their skills and experience into new and fulfilling careers." That's what I do now. If I didn't manually change that headline, it would default to my most recent job description. Now my case. My most recent job description is"heart centered career transition and job search coach." And then there's a hard stop, a space and a pipe stem, which is a special key on your keyboard that you can use to create hard stops between keywords. Um, and then the other one is I think"possibility thinker play in playing with possibilities." So that's what I consider my job title now. And if I didn't put in the value statement, that's what would automatically default. For you if you're a third grade teacher. That's what, and you've got that as your current title of your job. That's what's going to default to the headline. And I would prefer that you not use that but instead put in areas of expertise that you have or at least areas of expertise that you would like to have or that you're working towards. So some keywords that you could use that are still connected to what you do but are not necessarily directly tied to being a third grade teacher. You could have"Curriculum and Instruction," you could have a"K-12 Educator,"you could have um,"Data Analysis." Since I know you do a lot of data analysis."Problem Solving" those kinds of things. Could be your keywords. If those were things that you were interested in promoting about yourself. So I want you to take into consideration what is it that you would like to convey about who you are professionally and put that in your headline. Don't let it default to a job title that may or may not say anything about who you really are professionally. Keep in mind that this is a professional platform. You want to keep things on a professional level at all times. But for now that's what I want you to be thinking about doing with your LinkedIn profile. If you do nothing else, put in a headshot, add, a banner behind the headshot, and create a meaningful headline that takes the place of your current job title. If you have questions, please feel free to email me at kitty boitnott@gmail.com. I know, it was tough maybe to follow all of that on the podcast without a visual, so I'm going to connect. I'm going to offer that you can connect with me on LinkedIn and then you can look at mine for an example. If you need an example and if you have a specific question about email me at kittyboitnott@gmail.com. That's it for today. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." I'm so glad that you have been here. Please subscribe if you haven't already so that you'll be notified when future episodes are arrive and offer a review that will help to bump up the"Teachers in Transition" on iTunes and Stitcher so that other people can find me as well. This is Kitty Boitnott. Have a great week. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition.