Hello, my name is Jayne Corso and I am the Community Manager for the AEA. LinkedIn stands out as the social platform for professional development and industry sharing. It is a great resource for presenting yourself as an experienced evaluator as well as finding resources and networking opportunities that will benefit your practice and strategies. I have compiled a few tips that will help you create a stronger personal profile, and identified LinkedIn resources.
Hot Tip: Enhance your Profile
Go beyond just including a photo, work experience, and education – really enhance your profile by including your publications, skills, awards, independent course work, volunteer experience, or organizations you belong to. All of these features allow you to have a robust, well-rounded profile and will highlight your expertise as an evaluator.
Hot Tip: Use key words
Create a list of keywords that accurately communicate your expertise. For example, evaluation, visual data, statistics, research, and monitoring are searchable key words that resonate with evaluation. To improve your profile, incorporate these keywords repeatedly in your profile descriptions. This will allow your profile to be ranked high when the words are searched within LinkedIn. Placing keywords in your profile headline is also a great way to show your expertise and helps other users make an informed decision about connecting with you.
Hot Tip: Customize your LinkedIn URL.
When you join LinkedIn, the site creates a generic URL for your profile that includes a series of numbers. Similar to a website URL, these numbers do not resonate high in a search. Placing your name or keywords into your URL will improve the visibility of your profile. Here is a list of Instructions for how to customize your URL.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.