Is LinkedIn useful or useless?

It's really up to you. At the most basic level, humans do two things: we add value, or take up space. It's a blunt statement, but it holds some truth. For me, LinkedIn is helping me to understand the real value I can offer beyond my "skills", so I’ll try to explain below, but here are the main things to think about:

Do your colleagues actually know about ALL your skills and experience? LinkedIn can help highlight these as you connect and interact with your colleagues.

Do your colleagues understand your passions and professional interests? LinkedIn is a great platform to express these in updates and posts.

Can you actually remember all those people you are working with, or that person you saw in the hall last week? LinkedIn is brilliant for this. It has been hugely helpful for me in an environment where I am working with literally hundreds of people across different parts of the organisation in different countries.

Is there a skill that you enjoy using/developing, that is not applied in your current role? LinkedIn can help you find away to connect to others and utilise this, not only in your spare time on collaborative projects, but even within your current role, extending the value you can provide, in a way that you not have thought of.

I’m a slow adopter. I am skeptical of fads and I like to see things proven before I invest my time and resources. So, like many people I had setup LinkedIn profile years ago because I was told I “had to have one”. I didn’t really know why. I had about 100 contacts for several years and It was just my online CV.

In reality, it has been hugely rewarding to find that my unique mixture of skills, experience and interests can be fully utilised within my new role within a bank, it covers every kind of industry so I get the “big picture view” every day. I absolutely love it. So this led me to think that perhaps LinkedIn holds the key to unlocking the value of your personal brand and finding the best way to apply yourself, not only to connect you to your ideal role, but be able to make the most of the role you currently have.

For me, LinkedIn is helping me to identify my value to my team and to the organisation outside my core skills, which can sometimes feel like just a list of features on a box of software. I didn’t realise that my "soft skills" were just as valuable - perhaps even more so.

I never received training or a qualification for being passionate, enthusiastic, friendly and driven. But that value has enabled me to help land projects with Weta Digital, Coca-Cola USA and Google in New York. Sometimes that passion and enthusiasm has been a little to much for the local market, so it’s been good to work with managers and senior producers to help me direct this energy when I am being “too intense” or need to “slow down” and let the client or stakeholder lead the conversation.

Now that I have more confidence about how I add value and connect with an organisation, I’m learning to change gear and move with the flow of traffic. I’m no longer in a desperate bid to overtake everyone in case I miss out on all the action - it looks like we’ll get there right on time.

Now just for something really awesome, I found this fan art "test shot" for fully 3D version of the Futurama opening sequence from Alexy Zakharov.