Aspire: LinkedIn to Your Future
Once a month, we set aside a Friday for employees to focus on investing in themselves and their community. It's a day to spend time outside their daily task list and transform their careers. Check out other InDay posts here. - Ed.
This month's inDay theme was inspired by our colleague, Heyning Cheng, and manifested itself in different ways throughout the company on InDay. In December 2011 Heyning and a team of hackers created a hack aimed at helping LinkedIn members achieve their career aspirations.
Check out pictures from our March InDay here
Inspired by this work, the team suggested the theme Aspire for an inDay and Hackday. The goal for this inDay would be to challenge all LinkedIn employees to clearly define their own aspirations and take a step toward them, encourage everyone to look at how they can inspire those around them to chase their dreams and entice our engineers into looking at how the LinkedIn site can assist our members with their career plans. Along the lines of inspiring others, a group of us invited 130 8th graders from a local school to our office in Mountain View for a day of learning about what "career" means and what "jobs" you can have at a corporate company.
Eight departments at LinkedIn set up workshops focused either on introducing students to skills needed for that particular function (Finance, Sales, Blogging, IT) or on giving the students tools to think about and plan their future (Recruiting, Marketing, User Experience Design and our inVersity team). The most impactful for them, and they might not know it yet, may have been their time with the inVersity team which focuses on helping college students manage their careers before they even start so they have the advantage of a professional network upon graduation.
Activities in the other workshops included experiencing telesales by pitching a product to LinkedIn employees as far away as London, learning how to make a good first impression with a firm handshake and eye contact, and creating collages in a Marketing workshop on personal branding. They crisscrossed the LinkedIn campus to visit our Localization team, hear more about Hackdays, and see what "work" is like at LinkedIn. "I could never imagine getting this many employees at my company to participate in such an event said one parent chaperone as he watched the students build pin boards showcasing their dreams for their futures with the inVersity team.
After a wrap-up by CEO, Jeff Weiner, emphasizing the importance of finding the intersection of passion and skills to define your career aspirations, one parent said, "You definitely changed some lives today — maybe you'll never know how many — but you could see doors being opened and students thinking about new possibilities for their future." Exhausted, exhilarated, and inspired, all 140+ employee volunteers are ready to do it again.
If you're interested in doing this at your company, drop me a note on LinkedIn and I'll share the plan. It's so worth it!