How to Use LinkedIn to Boost Your Medical Career
Social media has become an integral part of both our personal and our professional lives, and a variety of platforms offer value to those in the medical industry. However, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned as a professionally focused social media outlet to help people achieve their career objectives. Regardless of your specific job within the healthcare space, your relevant specialty, or where you are along your career path, LinkedIn is likely to be helpful for you.
Here are a few ways to use LinkedIn to boost your career in medicine.
- Showcase your accomplishments.
LinkedIn offers a built-in resume-type template that guides you through communicating important aspects of your education, training, and experience. It is customizable so that you can order things based on your preferences, but its features help you identify what is most important to convey through your profile. Your LinkedIn profile can therefore serve as a sort of digital resume that can be easily updated and seamlessly sent around with the use of a link. If you want to get fancy, you can even make a LinkedIn badge that allows people to click to your LinkedIn profile. You can place this badge (which requires a short bit of code) anywhere you want – like in your email signature.
- Join relevant conversations.
Many professionals in medicine – such as healthcare providers – spend much of their day interacting with people rather than sitting at a desk. LinkedIn provides the flexibility to interact when it’s convenient for you. There is a plethora of medical content on the app, making it easy for you to keep up with news and industry trends and to join conversations that may help you establish your expertise. Unlike healthcare-specific social media platforms, LinkedIn also offers the advantage of covering all industries, so people focused on healthcare may also get important insights from professionals in other relevant, tangential industries through the app.
- Demonstrate your expertise.
By posting comments – or even better – your own articles, you can garner attention and build a portfolio of content that shows aspects of your expertise as well as your dedication to providing value for the healthcare community. Like your profile, links to your LinkedIn articles can be shared through other platforms and email and may even be identified by media outlets or influencers.
- Connect with new people.
While you should certainly connect with people you already know on LinkedIn to take full advantage of the networking aspect of the site, the search function can also help you find new people you may not know with whom you may want to collaborate or speak about potential career opportunities.
Takeaway: Healthcare is a complex and dynamic industry with professionals who are becoming increasingly burdened. While activities such as social media engagement may seem like low priorities to those in the medicine, LinkedIn is a tool that could potentially improve things for these professionals.
By determining the specific value that LinkedIn could bring you and then customizing your approach to use the tool to your advantage, you could boost your career and even enhance efficiency with respect to certain aspects of your job – such as keeping up on relevant news and literature. You will probably increasingly find at events and conferences that people are connecting through LinkedIn and talking about the specific ways they use this and other social media platforms to help them. Hearing stories from others about how LinkedIn has contributed to their success may also provide new ideas for how you can use the site to boost your career.
