In our weekly Research Culture Uncovered conversations we are asking what is Research Culture and why does it matter? This episode is part of Season 4, which focuses on Researcher Careers.

Ruth Winden, the Careers with Research Consultant at the University of Leeds, is your host for this season.

Over the years, many of our researchers at Leeds have embraced LinkedIn, with great success. From identifying key connections to building their networks, sharing their research, building communities, to landing job offers, and even getting headhunted straight off LinkedIn - there have been many breakthroughs.

And every breakthrough starts with having a strong, compelling and well-designed LinkedIn profile.

Today, I am sharing my tips and strategies for a creating a meaningful and attractive LinkedIn profile.

I begin by making a case why researchers need to engage with LinkedIn, whatever their career plans. The minimum effort I recommend is making time to create a profile that does them justice, and that attracts the right audience.

I then share three recent LinkedIn features that are worth exploring - and one that I want researchers to assess critically before they use it (and yes, it's all about the ChatGPT equivalent that we are expecting to be launched soon).

I finish with the 10 most common mistakes I see researchers make with their LinkedIn profiles. All 10 mistakes are fixable! Listen to my suggestions on how to resolve these issues.

Soon, I will also provide a bonus episode, where three researchers share the way they use LinkedIn. Stay tuned!

Please reach out to me if you have comments or questions! I love a good debate. I'm Ruth Winden on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Follow us on twitter: @ResDevLeeds, @OpenResLeeds, @ResCultureLeeds

If you would like to contribute to a podcast episode get in touch: academicdev@leeds.ac.uk

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be. Welcome to research culture uncovered. It's episode seven in the Researcher Career season. My name is Ruth Winden and I'm the Careers with Research Consultant at the University of Leeds. Today's episode is focused entirely on LinkedIn and what a difference LinkedIn has made for many of our researchers. I'll be sharing tips and strategies and point out some common mistakes I see researchers make. But don't worry, these mistakes are easy to fix.

Why should you invest time in LinkedIn if you work in academia? I know that many researchers question my enthusiasm for LinkedIn. They tell me: "I have enough on my to do list already. And now you're adding even more to it". "I'm already on Research Gate. I'm on ORCID. I have a university profile, so why should I add LinkedIn to the mix as well?" Or "well, academics are not on LinkedIn anyway, so I'm not wasting my time here." As you'll expect, I see things differently. There are several reasons why LinkedIn is essential.

In my view, whatever your role or the sector you want to work in. Admittedly, originally LinkedIn was not built for academia. It had a clear business angle. And for many years it was true that especially senior academics hardly ever appeared on LinkedIn. This has certainly changed. You will find many more academics and senior higher education leaders engage on LinkedIn. They share their research activities, post job opportunities, announce news and events, as well as their research groups and researchers' activities. All their activities make it easy to follow and engage with them and become part of their research circles.

Thirdly, many universities, including the University of Leeds, have a clear strategy about engagement with the communities our research is for, and with. The days of being an inward facing institution inn academia are long gone. We're here to solve the world's greatest problems, enhance knowledge and learning, and collaborate with a wide range of research partners locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. And one of the online places where our audiences, or stakeholders, as we call them, congregate all over the world, is LinkedIn. Whether that's funding bodies, private sponsors, organisations in our field, commercial, governmental or charitable research partners, the media, groups of end users, they are all bound to be on LinkedIn, at least to some extent. Lastly, LinkedIn is an ideal place to stay in touch, as most people keep their profiles and contact details well into their retirement. And because LinkedIn is seen as a more stable and long-lasting platform, especially in comparison to Twitter, right now, users are unlikely to leave unexpectedly. So here you are.

Quite a few reasons why I think it makes sense to be on LinkedIn, and I hope they resonate with you. So how much time do you need to spend on LinkedIn? I'd say give LinkedIn a go. Even if you just build and maintain a compelling profile, you never know what can happen. Many of our researchers get so much traction on LinkedIn, once they have optimised their profiles, suddenly they start to attract the right kind of people to their profiles, and opportunities start to come to them. We have even had researchers get headhunted straight from LinkedIn. Isn't that a wonderful way to find a new job? If you're ending your PhD or postdoc and walk into a fabulous career opportunity? Onto some nice new features. Let's start with Featured, a relatively recent addition to LinkedIn. It appears at the top of your profile and therefore gets high visibility. It's so prominent, you really can't miss it, which is a wonderful thing if you use the Featured section to share your most important work, projects and successes, anything that you want people to notice.

It could be a blog post, a video of you presenting your work at a conference, a certification, a newspaper article you appeared in, whatever you think is worth sharing. So, for instance, at the moment I'm keen to promote our Research Culture Uncovered Podcast. My only featured item is the podcast and nothing else. But you can showcase up to five pieces of content. If you want to show all five, then people must scroll through them to see them all. You pick as many items as you want. I was keen to only share one because I wanted to draw attention to the podcast and not distract the viewer with any of the other pieces I had before. And for sure, at some point I'll change it up again.

Keeping your featured section fresh and relevant is always a work in progress. But for now, I encourage you to think about what you want to share. What is your most relevant piece of work or achievement you want to highlight and take it from there. Play with it, change it up, see what happens, see how people respond. Another recent change is the huge emphasis LinkedIn places on skills. For a long time we've had a skills section where we can list up to 50 skills. Others can endorse us for our skills range and thereby evidence our skills set. Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of the endorsement feature, but it's not going away, so we have to find a way to make it work.

My rule is that I only endorse people for the skills I have seen them use. That's my personal choice. I just question the point of the endorsement function if everyone just endorses people randomly, like giving it a quick Facebook like. But we know that hiring managers and recruiters search for skills. Unless we do ourselves justice by having a comprehensive list of the skills we master, we lose out. What is new for skills. And what I find much more exciting is that we can now also list key skills in our experience section. So under each job entry we can add the skills we're using.

This makes our skill set so much more visible and meaningful because we can show our skills in a particular role, not just in general. This means we can also show the development of our skills, our increased competence levels and the skills which we apply in a given context rather than the indiscriminate list of 50 skills lower on our profiles. Just make sure you check out how the skills you list in a job, then affect your skills list further down on the profile. The new skills I added certainly reshuffled my original list of 50 skills. Actually, it messed up the order of my top three skills that are immediately visible in that skills list, and so I had to go back in and tidy things up a bit. Tedious, but worth the effort. So have a look at what skills you want to add in your Experience section. You don't want to miss this new feature as the skills in your job role appear so much higher in your profile than the old list lower down.

The third development I wanted to share is that Generative AI is coming to LinkedIn. Yes, you heard me right. We are still waiting for the rollout. But apparently LinkedIn will soon have a tool similar to Chat GPT, which will write our About section and the Experience section. To be honest, I'm skeptical about this new feature. On the one hand, yes, it can give us ideas or inspiration or even write things for us. And for those who struggle with writing online profiles, this might look like a godsend. My main worries are twofold.

Going by what I see Chat GPT create at present, I expect a lot of bland, mediocre profile content. If we use these tools indiscriminately, all of us will start to look generic and make us into commodities. We will all start to look the same. I've spent the last decade trying to help researchers express their uniqueness, their individual value and expertise. No one is a commodity in my books. We all offer something pretty special if we take time to recognise our diverse talents, strengths, attributes, skills and areas of expertise. So the last thing I want us to do is let go of all that and let an AI tool take over. I can just see the temptation because AI will be so fast, it will look okay and people will think it's probably good enough.

The other concern I have is that AI will create many ethical issues. Just imagine a researcher whose strengths might not be communication. Get AI to write all their marketing documents, including their LinkedIn profile and their content on LinkedIn, and then goes to interview. Very quickly it will become evident that the researcher's communication skills are not genuine, but AI generated. What a dilemma. Or maybe sometime in the future it will be acceptable. Who knows? But until then, how do we resolve this issue? I'd say avoid it altogether. Use AI for inspiration, but take control of your representation online, and on paper, and get writing.

So let's see when the AI tool arrives and how it will look like if you get it soon. I'd love to hear from you, as I'm keen to see how it works in action. And usually, although I have a paid account, I tend to get these new features very late. Big sigh. And now on to my last part of the podcast; the ten common LinkedIn Profile Mistakes and how to Avoid Them. So the first one is the default headline. You might not know this, but LinkedIn doesn't make it easy for us. First of all, I'd say don't neglect your headline.

Together with your name and your headshot, this is the first piece of information anyone sees about you when they search on LinkedIn. By default, LinkedIn pulls your current job title into the headline. But you're so much more than a job title. Don't become a commodity. And outside of academia, our job titles don't mean as much as to us. So depending on your career goal, the default job title won't help a prospect understand what your role entails. The headline is also an important part of the profile to attract the right audience. The keywords in your headline determine how highly your profile ranks in a LinkedIn search.

The search function on LinkedIn is similar to the search on Google or any other platform. It's all about AI and keywords. So to rank as highly as possible, think through which type of keywords or terms you want to include in your entire profile, but especially in your headline. Make the most of the 220 characters. The second mistake I see is lack of visuals, not having a photo, and not making the most of your banner image. With a headshot on your profile, LinkedIn claims you get 14 times as many profile views as without it. In this age where trust in online information is so low, you need to do all you can to show you a real person and not a scammer. So do upload a headshot.

Choose the formality or informality of your picture in line with your careers goal. Regarding your banner. First impressions count here as well. Don't leave the top of your profile blank and show the blue gray default LinkedIn banner. It's a missed opportunity to show immediately what you're all about. What kind of image signifies what you do. What image would draw the right people to your profile? For instance, if you research the French Revolution, why not show an image that shows just that? If you work on computational modeling, can you take a shot of your work? Unless it's confidential, of course, and upload it? Whatever you decide to show, ensure you have the full right to use the image. Many departments at Leads also have their own image banks, which you can access.

If in doubt, ask for permission to use it. Or use free sites like Unsplash.com, which has amazing images you can access for free as long as you acknowledge the creator. The third mistake I see is a lack of focus for your profile. Who do you want to attract to your profile and who do you not want to attract? Even repel, we can't attract everyone. There are 930,000,000 people on LinkedIn, and a generic profile rarely works. I see too many generic profiles because people fear that if it is specific, they will lose out on people. Looking a focused profile with a clear audience attracts more people who have a genuine reason to connect with you. So, for example, compare two PhD candidates in year four in medical engineering.

One looks for a consulting role, the other one is looking for a postdoc. How will their profiles differ and differ? They should for consulting, unless it's in the exact research field of medical engineering. That profile will focus much more on transferable skills, project management, any customer focus, and advisory experience. And it won't emphasize the research any papers as much as a profile geared at a postdoc, where information will be much more geared towards the research skills. The research focus publications, conferences, presentations. The selection criteria are different, and the LinkedIn profile needs to be tailored to that goal. If you're not quite sure yet about your direction, of course keep it more general. But do shape it once you know where you want to take your career.

The fourth mistake I see is a lack or shortage of information you provide under Experience. When people arrive on your profile and they're interested to find out more about you, don't disappoint them. Tell them more about your work. Share your remit, your focus, your achievements all as long as the information is not confidential and it is suitable to be in the public domain. Of course, many researchers share very little. Sometimes all they write in the Experience section about a role is just a one line. But that doesn't give the reader enough context. The challenge is to find the right balance.

You don't want to create an incredibly long profile either. You want to just provide the level of information people can digest. But don't keep it too short, because you'll just disappoint people who have a genuine interest in you. So play with it. Test it with others. Ask them whether the content you provide gives them enough to appreciate what you do. The fifth mistake is about neglecting the skills section. We talked about this earlier on the podcast.

You can add up to 50 skills on LinkedIn and Hiring. Managers and recruiters do search for specific skills. If you don't take the time to add them to your profile, you are at a disadvantage, as your profile won't show up high enough in the search rankings. Another mistake number six I see is that people copy their CV over to LinkedIn. That's just a common mistake, and to use the exact same content just doesn't work. Can you imagine an employer who sees your CV together with your LinkedIn profile and the information is identical? Yes, of course. The key dates and job titles have to correspond, but an exact replica of the information will only disappoint. LinkedIn gives you so much more scope to give a wellrounded representation of yourself.

Also, you must write your profile in the first person to create that engagement with your reader. Make it easy to skim. Show more personality than on a CV. Tell more stories. You've got the space. Make your content engaging. That's how people value information they find online. Something I suffer from every single day is when I get LinkedIn invitations to connect.

And they're not personalized, so I have no idea who these people are and what they want from me. So when you reach out to people to let you into their LinkedIn networks, give them a really good reason to say yes. On the desktop. You get a notification to add a personal note to your invitation request. Use it. Give the person the context of your approach. Maybe you met them at an event you read someone's academic paper or you want to continue the conversation, or you want to find out about job opportunities. Whatever it is, make it clear and make it enticing, so the other person understands where you're coming from and becomes excited to say yes and connect with you.

Call me old fashioned, but I hardly ever accept invitations from strangers who don't tell me what they want from me. Why should I do all the work and find out who they are and whether they are good connection for me? So give people a good reason and then they're more likely to accept your invitation. And once they accept, don't forget continue the conversation, send them a message back and build the professional relationship. If you like to use LinkedIn on your smartphone, it's not as obvious. To see how to personalize your message, you need an extra step. You will see three little dots that you need to click. Then you can add a message. I promise you, if you follow this advice, you will get much better response rates from the people you want to have in your networks.

And the 8th mistake is letting your profile go a little bit rusty. And yes, we're all guilty here. Even if you don't want to engage much on LinkedIn, don't neglect your profile and forget to update it. Don't set it and forget it. A LinkedIn profile is always a work in progress. As your careers develops, your LinkedIn will need to develop as well. Even if you just spend 15 minutes every month reviewing it, that can make all the difference. Don't neglect it.

Number nine. That's a mistake I see so often in academia and I'm a little bit baffled and that is people avoid to ask for recommendations. My background is in industry and I've never had that hesitation. So this is something that we need to address together. Asking for recommendation seems to be really challenging for researchers. Even though there are these highly talented colleagues who make such a difference with their work. They tell me asking for a recommendation feels embarrassing or they feel they don't deserve a recommendation because they're not as good as someone else. Or it feels like bragging to show recommendation on their profiles.

I always try to help them see recommendations differently, but I don't always succeed. Maybe we need to learn in higher education to show more appreciation for each other. A genuine recommendation, in my view, is meaningful. It shows our contributions and our impact and it shows what someone else values about us. How can this be so problematic? You are great at your job. Why don't you deserve that appreciation and recognition beyond your immediate work? So my challenge to you is who can you ask for a recommendation? What would you like them to recommend you for? Make a list of some people and be brave and reach out and see what they write about you. It always feels like a gift. And don't forget, you can also give recommendations, make someone feel appreciated today and seek someone out whose work you value and who could really do with some public appreciation.

And lastly, here is the mistake number ten and you can set this right really quickly so I thought that would be a good one to finish with. Don't forget to claim your personal URL on LinkedIn, your own domain name for your profile. When we join LinkedIn we are given our own profile page and web link. It is always a combination of random numbers. Ideally you want to change your personal web link to your name so it is easy to identify and remember. It also looks much cleaner on your CV and cover letter. So personalized LinkedIn profile address with your name is ideal for your job search activities. When you look at my LinkedIn profile you won't see any numbers, just my name.

And it goes like this www.LinkedIn.Com/in/ruthwinden/ It's basically just my name. All you need to do is go to your profile, look at the top right corner and click on "Edit Profile and your URL" and then delete the numbers that LinkedIn gave you initially and then add in your name. Depending on how common your name is, you might struggle now that we have 930,000,000 people on LinkedIn, but if you have a PhD and your name is already taken, then that's a quick way to claim your name and then never give it up. It's yours for life.

This has been a long episode but I hope you found our deep dive into LinkedIn and LinkedIn profiles valuable. I hope to see you on LinkedIn and I also hope you'll join me for my last episode in the research career season this year, on 14 June.

Until then, bye bye.

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