Linkedin Blog

Due to the realities of the economy and employment market today, it’s increasingly common to moonlight outside of work hours, start a small business on the side, consult for a variety of clients or, as The New York Times recently reported, work five or six part-time jobs simultaneously to pay the rent.

There are pros and cons to every situation, of course, and many people prefer to earn a living without a full-time, steady job. But there’s one area where “non-traditional” employment can pose a particular challenge: when creating a professional social media profile.

Storytelling is my true passion. Well, that and a great pair of shoes. At four years old I got my first fancy footwear, a pair of ice skates. After balancing a competitive figure skating career and the life of a regular public school kid for fourteen years, I decided to head off to college and pursue another passion, journalism. So I shifted gears and landed at Syracuse, focusing on finance and broadcast journalism. Back then I could only dream of working in the CNN newsroom or at The New York Times. But in my role today in our corporate communications team, I’ve been lucky enough to do both.

It’s definitely been an adventure getting here, but I’m not one to shy away from a challenge (you should see some of the heels I can walk in!). I took my first reporting job in South Dakota and didn’t even know what a tornado siren was. By the time I decided to head west, I was actually the one chasing storms, and news stories, in the KDLT-TV news truck.

This series covers the top 5 stories that our members are sharing on LinkedIn Today. You can check out Daniel Roth‘s column here. – Ed

Unless you were living off the grid somewhere, you saw the news that Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple on Wednesday. It was the biggest business event of the week — and the flood of articles and tweets was impossible to ignore. Yet the most shared story across LinkedIn centered on another tech personality, investor Marc Andreessen, who wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal called “Why Software Is Eating The World.”

Since 2007, LinkedIn has been running monthly Hackdays (now, part of our Indays) that encourages our engineering teams to work on new and innovative projects. So far, we’ve had over 200 contributions, more than 50 winners, 14 projects featured on LinkedIn Labs, and over 15 products that have made it onto the LinkedIn site.

In a brown bag session a few months ago with our CEO Jeff Weiner, Iain Gilmore from our Marketing Solutions team in London asked if there was an opportunity for non technical employees to take part in Hackday. Jeff saw no reason for non-techies not to be involved and in true Captain Kirk style said “make it so” and thus INtrepreneur Day in Europe was born.