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JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 13

One of the most important aspects when it comes to starting a business is to surround yourself with
people who will add to the project. Networking can be a good formula for this.

Whatever the situation of your students is, for this type of meeting to be fruitful, a strategy must be
drawn up that involves preparation and post-event work. They can help themselves with applications
that are especially useful for networking. These are some of the key aspects that will help the network
that is being woven to generate employment opportunities:

Orient their social network profiles in a professional way. They need to include the keywords of their
specialty in their LinkedIn bio. Concepts, programmes, trends… everything in that type of sites helps
them position themselves as experts in a given sector. They have to follow and participate in the
conversations that are generated thanks to the hashtags related to their field of work, and share
relevant content to add value to their professional profile.

Teach them how to create an elevator pitch. This technique consists of preparing a speech that
describes the idea of a given business or product or their career and professional objectives in a brief
way (as a person goes up in the lift). This content can be used as an introduction to tables in which
your students participate, letters of introduction to accompany their CVs or used in a more informal
conversation with specialists or potential investors.

Building and maintaining a network of professional relationships is essential to enrich the resume and
work experience of your students. It will help them advance professionally and open the door to new
job opportunities.

Networking 2.0: LinkedIn
Since we already know what networking is, what is networking 2.0 then? Well, it is nothing more than
what we have been repeating during these materials: the move from the traditional to the modern,
from the physical to the online, and from the national to the global.

We will now explain what new networking is, as well as LinkedIn, the best known professional social
network at a global level, which has the potential to function as a digital and global network, a place
where your students can have all their professional contacts located, find new partners for new
projects, or even find jobs or employees for their own companies.
LinkedIn, as we say, is a professional social network, that is to say, it is oriented more to commercial
and professional relations than to personal relations and therefore in this social network what you will
find are companies and professionals who seek to promote themselves, network and do business.

The first step to start using LinkedIn is very similar to making a CV. You have to register, create an
account (free) and start filling in your professional details which are basically what you would put on a
CV: professional qualifications, education, current and past jobs, skills, publications, etc. When the
process is completed, you will begin to see the first signs of the enormous potential that lies within
LinkedIn because as you complete your information, the website begins to explore your relationships
and discover things that are likely to surprise you. For example: if someone indicates that he/she has
held a job in a certain company during a period of time, LinkedIn will examine among its members the
employees of that company who have also been working there during the same period.
It is normal that even in small companies LinkedIn finds quite a few people and proposes them to their
users as potential contacts, and they choose whether to accept them or not. Many people have