Networking is standard among many professionals, but nurses aren’t generally natural or willing networkers. Many nurses go to work, serve their patients, collaborate with their colleagues, and even save lives along the way, and then they understandably want to go home to their families.
When you want to nurture and develop your nursing career and create new opportunities for yourself, meeting people and making connections can be essential keys to your future. LinkedIn is a great way to create those new relationships, even though many nurses don’t even recognize this as a possibility.
LinkedIn 101
LinkedIn is arguably the top online professional networking platform. Consultants, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and entrepreneurs connect through LinkedIn. The millions who use the platform make it an active and robust community where people spend time seeing, being seen, sharing, and, most importantly, connecting with like-minded professionals.
While some may view the potential of LinkedIn as nothing more exciting than an online resume, there’s a great deal more to the story.
Your LinkedIn profile is your window into the professional online world, and there’s so much that others can learn about you from your headshot, “About” section, work history, the organizations you belong to, where you were educated, your top skills, and even awards and recognition you’ve received. Your profile should be complete, information-packed, well-written, and engaging, and there are plenty of tricks and hacks for making it stronger and more effective.
Since LinkedIn is a search engine, keywords matter, so your profile should be chock full of keywords related to your skills, career, and experience. And since many recruiters use LinkedIn to find potential job candidates, the more complete and keyword-rich your profile is, the more likely you are head-hunted for a job you may want to consider.
In essence, the LinkedIn 101 lesson to absorb is to ensure you have an optimized profile so that people who encounter you on the platform have a good sense of who you are and where your expertise lies.
Take it a Few Steps Further
Once you have a complete profile, you’re ready to head into the LinkedIn universe. A simple way to get started is to use the search function to find:
- Fellow nurses and healthcare professionals in your local area or further afield
- Nurses who share your same expertise or interests
- Employees of specific organizations and facilities
- Organizations and companies to follow and research
- The leaders of organizations and facilities you’d like to explore as potential employers
- Recruiters
- Job postings
- LinkedIn Groups of like-minded professionals
Aside from these search functions, you can also use your LinkedIn feed to find news, articles, posts, and commentary by other users and organizations you follow. Using keywords (or random scrolling), you can become involved in conversations in the comments section of others’ posts and even share your thoughts, reflections, and opinions with links to articles, research, or news of note.
Part of the secret sauce of connecting on LinkedIn involves coming across someone you find interesting and risking sending them a private message and asking to connect. You can invite them for a Zoom chat or phone call. If they work at an organization you’re interested in, or if they have an area of professional focus that intrigues you, these can be golden opportunities to get an insider’s view of a particular nursing specialty, a facility of interest, or perhaps a general area of the healthcare industry that you’re curious about.
For example, let’s say that you’ve always wondered what the career of a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) is like. So, you type that title into the search bar, and up comes people, jobs, posts, events, and companies related to your search. These results are an excellent jumping-off point to explore what kinds of jobs are out there, the salary ranges offered, who’s doing this sort of work, what companies employ them, and what people say about advanced practice nursing.
While any research you do on LinkedIn isn’t going to be the last word on a topic, it can be a treasure trove of information to sift through and get you started.
Dare to Network Like There’s No Tomorrow
In the final analysis, so much good can come from deciding to use LinkedIn as the networking tool that it is. There are thousands of interesting, talented, and knowledgeable people, some of whom would be happy to connect with you.
Networking involves little risk with the potential for significant reward. Thus, the return on investment for your time and energy can add up to some serious dividends. After all, it only takes one fantastic connection to change your life and career.
If you don’t put yourself out there and ask for what you want, someone will not likely hand it to you out of the blue. This is where the networking rubber truly hits the road. Squeaky wheels get their fair share of grease in the professional world, and your journey down your career highway can be informed as much by the people you know as what you’re capable of doing.
If you can accept the dare to create a LinkedIn profile to be proud of and use it to be a bold and audacious networker, there’s no end to the magic that might happen. But if you sit at home in your living room waiting for the magic to happen spontaneously, you’ll probably end up waiting quite a long while.
LinkedIn isn’t going anywhere, so sign up, log on, maximize your profile, and truly network like there’s no tomorrow.
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