You can use LinkedIn to get noticed for your career after cancer. The networking service is loaded with folks you may have worked with who know people you may want to work with and so on and so forth. You can leverage this tool to start laying the groundwork for your career after cancer beginning today.

Here are some of my best “rules” to use to get noticed on LinkedIn.

  1. Use LinkedIn to share industry related content — do not be “spammy” but do share occasional interesting to you news articles about the industry you want to join. When you are ready to do so, you can and should include a brief description about the article and why you are sharing it but be very careful to make sure your sentence structure is great and all spelling and grammar is perfect, too. Try to do this at least once a month. Beware you do not post the same article twice.

  2. Your summary on LinkedIn should be on point — it should boil down to your Elevator Value Pitch, which I shared here already and which talks about who you are and what you can do.

  3. Consider inviting people to connect with you in a professional way. If you are on an interview or at a networking event and find yourself really connecting well in person, you can and should ask if it would be acceptable for you to connect with them on LinkedIn.

  4. Always be professional on LinkedIn — your profile picture should be of just you in professional attire. Do not post things that would better be kept to Facebook or just off social media entirely.

  5. Ask friends and former colleagues to recommend you on LinkedIn and offer to do the same for them. If they agree to do so, ask if they would like you to draft something so they can just copy and paste it to your profile. If they are not able or interested in doing that, ask them instead to just click on your skills for the ones they want to endorse you for on your profile (and offer to do the same).

Doing these simple steps — either 1 or all 5, can make your LinkedIn profile stand out for the right reasons and lead to potential calls and/or interview requests for your career after cancer.

A future article will focus on leveraging your contacts for your career after cancer by reaching out and asking for advice for your job hunt and more.