Reflective Summary: Topic 3

This topic has been incredibly insightful, particularly seeing as it is directly applicable to my situation at the moment as a final year student thinking about future employment prospects.

The statistics I found doing my research around the topic were pretty astounding. I hadn’t been aware that a whopping 99% employers used LinkedIn to search potential employees, and the fact that the majority of them state that they have ruled out a candidate due to something negative they found online really brings home the fact that online identity plays a huge role in one’s professional life.

Nonetheless, I’ve concluded that these stats shouldn’t scare us.

Hayley, in her blog, discussed how important it is to “brand ourselves”, and provides a link to a video demonstrating her view that in order to develop an authentic professional profile it is important to be active and relevant. While she started the post with the line: “Unfortunately, our online behaviour is socially and culturally judged”, invoking that it’s a negative thing, I feel that her findings actually showed that the visibility of our online identities is incredibly positive and exciting.

While Zia, in his blog, listed the minimum requirements for any online professional profile, implying that we must “fit in” to what is expected, he also provided a video about being “attractive” and actually standing out to employers.

I believe that this attempt to stand out, by going beyond the “minimum requirements” doing things such as blogging, providing a video, or anything that is specific to the field one wishes to pursue, is the way to get the best out of one’s professional online identity.