How High School Students Can Benefit From Using LinkedIn

When our students enter the world of work, we want them to have a documented set of skills that potential employers will value. Over the last four decades as a student, teacher, and school leader, I have seen schools try to augment career readiness by introducing skills portfolios, learner passports, and records of achievement. I have seen schools buy guidance programs, software packages, and credentialing services. Yet so many initiatives still provide little of what the world outside of school requires or recognizes as valuable.

It wasn’t until I led a student session on writing résumés that I realized there is an obvious choice to help students not only document their future-ready skills, but acquire more: LinkedIn.

What our students need already exists

Over 1 billion people use LinkedIn. That popularity is why it’s used by so many recruiters and HR departments. I’ve experienced this firsthand, having been recruited through LinkedIn for my first principal job.

But it’s not only for experienced professionals: The minimum age required to create a free LinkedIn account is 16. When our students finish their schooling, many will inevitably set up a LinkedIn profile, if they don’t already have one, to present themselves to their potential employers and future colleagues. Learning how to create the most well-recognized digital portfolio while still in school is a valuable use of career education time. Regardless of what career readiness (or college readiness) framework or requirements a school has in place, a LinkedIn profile can serve as the portfolio.

Each LinkedIn user’s profile page is a digital CV that lists professional experience, education, projects, courses (professional development), publications, and skills, along with other CV staples like languages and organizations. The format is as clear as it gets, and the platform itself suggests ways to improve content and gain traction.

Building a future professional portfolio

For one of our school’s career days, we decided to complement our regular program of visiting speakers (parents and members of the Rotary Club) by having students create a “professional” email address—a name-based one that can last a lifetime. (We learned that about 60 percent of them did not have a “future-proof” email address. And very few students continue to use their school-provided address after graduation.)

The students then used this new email address to open a LinkedIn account, which we taught them to build as a digital portfolio, including their background and their current school. If your school doesn’t already have a LinkedIn page, the administration can set one up for your students, staff, and alumni to connect to.

After showing the students how to build out their profile by adding things like courses, languages, and projects, we used the following prompts to help them start thinking about how they might get to where they want to go:

• What would you like to do in 10 years?
• What will you have to do or study to get there?
• Who is doing your dream job at the moment?
• What was their educational and experience path?
• Which universities and companies are offering the courses and experiences you would like to have?
• Which companies could be an internship provider?

By searching for people who have their dream jobs, students can explore the pathways that got them there. Once they find some professional role models, they can reverse-engineer their career paths, identify which universities and companies come up on those paths, and then begin to follow these aspirational figures.

By reading some of their posts and comments—to see what they’re doing, learning, and thinking about—the students can benefit from their insights and recommendations. And if the students have something to say or ask, they can add their own posts to contribute to a discussion.

Through LinkedIn, we are also able to connect our students to alumni and parents in positions to mentor them and support their growth with internships. The beauty is that it’s the students who can now find the alumni through their own interest areas. There is more information at the students’ disposal on LinkedIn than any school could possibly bring together in a career fair.

Teachers and administrators can also benefit from LinkedIn by maintaining their portfolio of professional development, exploring LinkedIn Learning courses, joining groups built around career-related interests, and following professional influencers (which might even help them bring more career-related information into their classrooms).

I recognize that there may be some hesitation about using this external platform in school, but I believe that it is far more useful, and far safer, than many other online activities. Using advisory or homeroom time, we continue to monitor students’ LinkedIn use by periodically viewing their profiles; looking for interactions with the people, companies, and institutions they follow; and asking them what they have been learning from their network. Building a LinkedIn profile is the initial goal, but we consider it a success when students become more engaged and begin to establish their professional presence.