Take a deep breath. It’s time to face that thing you’ve been avoiding. That thing that strikes fear in the heart of virtually every academic. That thing that announces to the world that a) you exist and b) you are looking for work.

Yes, reader, I am talking about LinkedIn.

Admit it: You hate the thought of LinkedIn. If, that is, you think about it at all. You think LinkedIn is something the business school students are obsessed with, and something incalculably alien* to your life and your professional pursuits.

If you even have a profile, and you probably don’t, you made it years ago, added your education, listed your academic position, and never looked at it again. Basically, you avoid the platform entirely because it feels corporate, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable.

This is a mistake.

LinkedIn is not simply a networking site. It is the primary professional database used by recruiters, hiring managers, collaborators, and organizations trying to understand who does what work. When someone hears your name, when you send an email, when you apply for a position, the first thing many people do is search for you there.

What they see matters.

Your LinkedIn page (or the absence of one) IS telling a story about you. There are good LI pages, and bad ones. Post-ac PhDs have your own special set of challenges in making LI work for you, because your work history, profile, and skills don’t map seamlessly and effortlessly into the “lingua franca” of the realm.

And so, this week you are going to make or update your LinkedIn profile. You are going to really take charge of it. Put effort and thought into it. And approach it (as with so many other elements of this transition) as a research project. The great thing about LI is that everyone else’s pages are visible!  And networks are large and active. Find one post-ac PhD in your general area, and their network will lead you to countless others. Follow that trail into the forest!

The goal of this LI revision? To make your page reflect all of the competencies you have identified in our earlier weeks together in this 52-week project.

You’re going to highlight tangible, transferable skills, and not a series of obsolete or opaque academic roles.

First, set aside one hour.  One real uninterrupted hour, like you would for any of your regular professional tasks.

Open your profile. Look at it as if you were an employer encountering you for the first time.

What does it communicate?

Most academic profiles list degrees, dissertation titles, publications, awards, fellowships, conferences, and course titles.

None of those things clearly signal what problems you solve or what skills you bring to an organization.

I was asked to look at a resume this past week for a PhD seeking a professional staff job on campus.  It was a very corporate-sounding job ad. The person is very well qualified, but gave me a resume that simply listed course after course after course of university teaching. The job was not a teaching job, in any way shape or form. So how could listing teaching help? It couldn’t. I explained the need to summarize relevant skills mobilized within the overarching teaching career (without getting bogged down in individual class names) and how to translate those using the keywords of the job ad.

To be sure, your task is not to erase your academic background. Your task is to translate it.

Start with the headline. The default LinkedIn headline is usually your current job title or institutional affiliation. For many academics that means something like doctoral candidate, lecturer, or assistant professor. Those titles do not tell an employer much about what you actually do, because remember: nobody understands these terms outside of academia.

Instead, your headline should describe your expertise and the type of work you perform, using action verbs and role descriptions that have currency broadly in the industry, corporate, non-profit etc realm you are targeting. (Don’t know what those are? Then you need to set aside an hour for research first!)

Someone who studies policy might write “policy researcher and analyst focused on higher education and workforce systems.” Someone who teaches writing and communication might describe themselves as “communication specialist and writing trainer focused on translating complex ideas to non-specialist audiences.” Someone who works with data might frame their experience as “research analyst and data storyteller.”

Again, don’t reinvent the wheel here, at first. Dive deeply into others’ examples. Maybe even make a file or database of example language you like. Borrow liberally, and then rework to make your won.

The goal is clarity. When someone reads the headline they should immediately understand what kind of professional you are.

Next look at your experience section. This is where translation becomes most important.

Academic CV language often focuses on one-off achievements such as taught courses, conducted research, presented papers, or service on committees. While those achievements are real, they do not communicate transferrable competencies to employers outside academia.

Rewrite your descriptions so that they emphasize the skills you benchmarked earlier in the series. If you managed a research project, say that you “led a multi-year research initiative involving data collection, analysis, and reporting on [broadly comprehensible topic] in collaboration with wide range of stakeholders.” If you supervised teaching assistants, say that you” supervised and mentored staff members responsible for instructional delivery.” If you coordinated conferences or workshops, describe the event planning, stakeholder coordination, and logistical management involved.

This is not in any way unethical or dishonest. All of it is accurate description of the true scope of your labor and background, just using language the labor market understands.

You may notice something as you rewrite these sections. Work that once felt narrowly academic begins to look like project management, communication, leadership, data analysis, or program development. That’s what you want! That means your eyes are finally starting to open, and your vision widening from those academic blinders. You DO have the competencies organizations seek! That’s what I’ve been telling you!!

After updating your experience entries, review your skills section. LinkedIn allows you to list specific competencies and many recruiters search profiles using those keywords. Add the skills that appeared repeatedly in the job postings you analyzed earlier. Project management, policy analysis, qualitative research, stakeholder communication, data analysis, or strategic planning are common examples.

As you do this work of aligning your profile with the language employers use, you’ll feel awkward and hesitant. That’s ok. But don’t stop. Keep digging until you have a healthy list of real transferable skills reflected on your page. (Slightly more advanced: you can seek endorsement of those skills from collaborators.)

Finally, read through the entire profile as a coherent narrative. Does it communicate what you actually do and what problems you are equipped to solve? If someone unfamiliar with academia read it, would they understand the value you bring?

If the answer is yes, the profile is doing its job.

Updating your LinkedIn profile does not guarantee job offers. Nothing in a labor market can promise that. What it does do is make your work legible. It allows people outside your department or discipline to recognize your competencies and imagine how those competencies might function in their organization.

Visibility matters more than many academics realize.

Next week we will build on this visibility by reaching outward and identifying the professional communities where people doing your target roles gather and exchange information.

For now, take the hour. Translate the work you have already done. Make your expertise visible.

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*Can you tell I just went to see The Hail Mary Project?