A LinkedIn Profile for Students and Graduates: A Practical Guide

A LinkedIn profile does two jobs for a student or graduate. It lets employers and recruiters find you, and it gives you a reason to contact people you would otherwise never meet. You do not need years of experience to make it work. You need a profile that is complete, specific and honest, and a habit of using it a little each week.

You must be at least 16 to use LinkedIn under its user agreement, so this guide is mainly for sixth formers, college and university students, and recent graduates.

Start with the parts people see first

Photo

Use a clear, recent photo of your face, with plain lighting and a simple background. It does not need to be taken by a professional. A phone photo against a wall works. Profiles with photos look complete; profiles without them can look abandoned.

Headline

Your headline sits under your name and follows you everywhere on the site, in search results, comments and messages. If you leave it blank, LinkedIn fills it with your current role or course, which says very little.

Write what you are studying or have studied, plus what you are aiming for or interested in. For example:

• “BSc Psychology student, University of Leeds | Interested in educational psychology and SEND”
• “Computer Science graduate | Python, SQL, data analysis | Looking for junior developer roles”

Keep it factual. Avoid labels like “aspiring visionary” or “passionate go-getter”. They tell a reader nothing they can check.

About section

This is a short introduction in your own voice. Three short paragraphs are plenty:

1. What you are studying or have studied, and what drew you to it.
2. What you have done that relates to the work you want: a project, a placement, a part-time job, a society role.
3. What you are looking for now.

Write in the first person. Use plain words. If you are applying for teaching assistant roles, say so; if you are open to graduate schemes in a particular sector, name it. Recruiters search by keywords, so use the terms that appear in the job adverts you are interested in, as long as they are true of you.

Experience: more of it counts than you think

Students often leave the experience section empty because they have not had a “proper” job. Part-time and casual work counts. So do volunteering, society committee roles, tutoring, sports coaching, caring responsibilities you are comfortable mentioning and substantial university projects.

For each entry, add two or three lines on what you did and what came of it. “Served customers” is weak. “Trained four new staff on the till and stock system” is stronger, if it is true. The same principles apply as on a CV, and the guide to writing a CV with little experience goes into this in more detail.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile and your CV agree on dates and job titles. Employers do compare them.

Education, skills and the Featured section

List your course, institution and dates. Add modules, a dissertation title or grades if they help your case.

In the skills section, pick skills you could talk about in an interview. A short list of ten relevant skills is more useful than fifty generic ones.

The Featured section lets you pin examples of your work near the top of your profile: a portfolio, a GitHub repository, a blog post, a poster from a conference, a video of a presentation. For students, this is often the most persuasive part of the profile, because it shows rather than tells.

Connections: start close, then widen

Begin with people you already know: classmates, lecturers, colleagues from part-time jobs, people from placements and volunteering. Then add alumni from your university, people in roles you would like to have and staff at organisations you are interested in.

When you send a request to someone you have not met, add a short note. Say who you are and why you are getting in touch. Do not ask for a job in the first message. Something like this is enough:

“Hello Priya, I’m a final-year psychology student at Leeds and I’m interested in educational psychology. I read your post about your route into the profession and would be glad to follow your work.”

There is good evidence that this wider network matters. In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that “weak ties”, acquaintances rather than close friends, are often the source of new job information, because they move in different circles from you. In 2022 a team of researchers including Karthik Rajkumar, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral tested this with data from large-scale experiments on LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature, covering about 20 million users over five years. The study was published in Science. They found that moderately weak ties were the most useful for job mobility, more so than very close or very distant connections.

Use it, lightly

A profile that never changes is easy to overlook. You do not need to post every day. A few small habits are enough:

• follow the organisations you would like to work for
• comment thoughtfully on posts in your field now and then
• share something you made or learned once in a while, such as a project write-up
• update your profile when something changes, such as a new role, result or qualification

If you prefer not to post at all, that is fine. A complete profile and a growing network still do much of the work.

Messages and interviews

When a recruiter or alumnus replies, keep your messages short, polite and specific. If someone offers a call, prepare a few questions about their work and their route into it. Many of these conversations end up feeling like informal interviews, so the advice on answering “tell me about yourself” applies here too.

Privacy and safety

Do not put your home address, date of birth or phone number on your public profile. Check your privacy settings to decide who can see your connections and contact details. Be wary of “job offers” that ask you to pay a fee, move the conversation quickly to another app, or ask for bank details before any interview. Legitimate employers do not charge you to apply.

If a message makes you uncomfortable, you can report it through LinkedIn and block the sender. If you think you have been the victim of a scam, report it to Action Fraud.

A quick checklist

Before you start sending connection requests, check that you have added a clear photo and written a specific headline. Read your About section aloud to make sure it sounds like you. List every role, including part-time work and volunteering, and say what you did in each. Add the course details, projects and skills that support your aims, and pin one or two pieces of work in Featured. Then begin connecting, with a personal note each time.

Further reading

• Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
• Rajkumar, K., Saint-Jacques, G., Bojinov, I., Brynjolfsson, E. and Aral, S. (2022). A causal test of the strength of weak ties. Science, 377(6612), 1304-1310.
• Newcastle University Careers Service. Using social media for your career. ncl.ac.uk/careers.
• LinkedIn. User Agreement and Privacy settings help pages. linkedin.com.
• Action Fraud. Reporting fraud and cyber crime. actionfraud.police.uk.

Cover image: Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash.