Are you LinkedIn?

Are you? While I constantly enjoy and promote the advantages of Web 2.0 applications for students and young professionals, it took me quite some time to realize the valuable advice of some of my industry connections who had told me that I should join LinkedIn in order to enhance my networking opportunities and gear myself up for the career highway. However, in the end it was one of my dear SGS Berlin fellow members who convinced me to join. Thanks Christian!

For those of you who haven't heard of LinkedIn before: LinkedIn is the largest business-related social networking site in the world. It gives you the opportunity to stay connected to your colleagues, fellow students and friends which pretty much sounds like Facebook at the first view. However in contrast to Facebook, LinkedIn has its focus on business connections. You can create your own CV-like profile, follow companies or join topic-related discussion groups to keep yourself up to date about your fields of work, study and interest. Your colleagues and bosses can give you recommendations for your achievements and you can even browse for job offers and apply for those positions via LinkedIn.

Fuddy-duddy written applications are still the ne plus ultra for some people, but in my eyes we left that era years ago and now have entered a new one with a job market which is way faster and more complex, but in some way also easier if you're open to change. The founders of LinkedIn saw this dawn of a new era many years ago. This vision has made them billionaires. Today, LinkedIn is a huge success with almost 100 million users with membership increasing more and more. However, even though there has been a German-speaking version of LinkedIn since February 2009 for my autobahn-loving fellow citizens, it appears to me that they prefer traffic calming instead of bombing down the career highway. Fortunately, once again this gives you the chance to turn something bad into something really good because you can still become a part of the speerhead of what will hit the business world like Facebook did with our social life some years ago. To keep it with LinkedIn: Relationships Matter. How much do they matter to you?