Ocean Conservation networking could mean you could get a job in your career path by possibly bypassing the application process.

Imagine you are sitting around one day and you get an email from a colleagues, in your network, who makes you aware of an upcoming job at his/her organization and thinks you would make a great fit. So you can just send them a resume and they will interview you without looking at other applicants first because they know you through their network. Sounds great doesn’t it?

There is only one problem…YOU DON’T HAVE A NETWORK of people in your field, so the above situation was made up!

Back in the day, networking in Ocean Conservation meant travelling to conferences or meetings to meet people and build a professional relationship with them. It was much harder to meet people before the internet. Then email came around and list-serves were created, where people can join email groups to have specific subject matter emailed to their inbox. List-serves made it easier to network online, but you still couldn’t find out much about people unless you personally emailed them, which people didn’t like all that much because they thought it was spam. But now, we can find out about people and make meaningful connections through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus…but LinkedIn is the site I on which you need to focus most of your energy!

LinkedIn is a site that is dedicated building online connections with other people in your field of interest that you couldn’t connect with offline. Many people have the preconceived notion that your LinkedIn profile is just another way of displaying your resume online to show potential hiring managers, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

LinkedIn is a place where you can establish yourself as an expert on a particular subject where people will seek you out for answers or for your advice. I’ve built my network up to almost 3,000 people (at the time of writing this post I was at 2,884 people) and I’ve created a network of people who are in my field that can help me share a story, search for a job position, or let me know of an Ocean news story that would be perfect for a post on SpeakUpForBlue.com.

My point is you should be on LinkedIn to help you in your Ocean Conservation Career!

Over the next few weeks, I will help you get familiar with LinkedIn and help you becomes established on this site to become the “Go-to” person in your Ocean Conservation Field. I will warn you that these upcoming “How-To” videos will be a bit longer than the normal OCC TV – Tips videos because there is so much information on them that it’s difficult to make them short.

Check out the video below to get familiar with LinkedIn and optimize your profile (or build an optimized profile if you don’t already have one) so people can connect with you based on keywords in your field.