A Social Way to Explore Choice of Major: LinkedIn Alumni
LinkedIn recently launched an update to its seriously awesome Alumni tool, and, as I’m sure you’ll see upon reading this point, I am nerdy excited about it. This visually appealing and easy to navigate way of searching for a complete listing of any university’s alumni on LinkedIn has always been powerful, but for students exploring careers, the tool just got kicked into hyper-drive.
Here’s a screenshot of the landing page of LinkedIn Alumni for me, with my alma mater, Saint Joseph’s University.
A screenshot of the landing page for LinkedIn Alumni for Saint Joseph’s University, page 1.
What you’re not seeing is that just below this image on my screen is a listing of all of those 24,000+ alumni in the form of their LinkedIn Profiles, but that’s not even my favorite part. See that dark gray right arrow next to the “What they do” section? Well, if you click on that you get taken to a brand new page for searching which looks like this…
The new page for LinkedIn’s Alumni tool search, now including search options for major, skills, and degree of connection!
Now, you can easily click on the blue fields to sort any college or university’s alumni by things like their choice of major, their skills, and their degree of connection to you. Incredible!
For those in the career exploration field in higher education, this is a game changer in terms of using social media to advise students. Want to see where your History major from XYZ College can take you? Want to know where your unique skill set might be valued most by an organization or field? Explore some options on LinkedIn’s Alumni search.
I know there are many more ways you can utilize these new search options, so with that in mind, I’d love to know more about how you’ve worked with LinkedIn Alumni in a comment below.
By Kevin
Thanks for pointing out this update! I can’t wait to dig into the areas of study part. Thus far, I’ve mostly used this tool to look at career fields and then locations with students, and then discuss how to best reach out to the resulting alumni.
My pleasure, Laura. I’m looking forward to digging further in, too. I had another thought – perhaps this search will make it possible to do many more industry or major-specific alumni panels or virtual events with the new search options. Now that we can sort by major, there’s a world of possibility in connecting with alums who can get connected back to their academic departments.