Building Blocks for Professional Development — GVSU PRSSA – Grand Valley State University Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America

I met with Dayna Phillips, a career advisor for Grand Valley State University’s Career Center, regarding my plan for my professional career and asked her about the steps I could take to improve my LinkedIn profile. I’ve learned that networking and using LinkedIn is an essential part of professional life, development, and job search. From our conversation, I created this three-step guide that you can use to take your network to the next level.

1. Establish your geographic focus - where you want to work.

Honing in on certain locations and areas of interest for work will help you to connect with professionals in close proximity. This allows you to find potential companies and organizations to join or work for. For my own network, I wanted my geographic focus to be in both the Boston Greater Area and also the Metro Detroit Area. Right now I am in the process of finding a summer internship in the Metro Detroit area, but after I graduate, I plan on moving to Boston to pursue my professional career. Therefore, I gave both areas equal focus in pursuing connections, expanding my network, and researching areas of employment.

2. Create a list of people you want to connect with and follow on LinkedIn.

Building your LinkedIn network is a great way to explore new opportunities that you may have been unaware of. Connecting with professionals who are in your area of work and organizations you are interested in will help to broaden your horizons. Start off with your personal connections. I looked at friends, family members, past employers, and my peer’s LinkedIn profiles to find other connections to grow my network. This also included connecting with all of my past professors, faculty from the career center, and others employed by GVSU. I looked at advertising and public relations and marketing professionals and connected with them through the alumni feature on the GVSU LinkedIn page. In addition to these personal connections, start to branch out into forming professional connections. The way I do this is by following companies I am interested in and connecting with employees there who are in the Ad/PR and marketing fields. I then reach out to a few of these employees with a personalized message regarding my interest in the company in order to gain more knowledge about the company culture and to ask to talk more in-depth

3. Put your plan into action.

Create your specific plans, commitments, and timing strategies. I would suggest creating a Gantt Chart to keep track of week-to-week implementations. For example, you can start with the week of March 1st and write a goal of “email connections from Adcraft Detroit 2022,” or even something more general such as “attend one organizational meeting per month.” This will be able to help you stay on track and measure your progress.

Get growing!

You can improve your LinkedIn profile and professional network by posting more content that your connections can relate to, staying updated on what you are doing, what you are passionate about, what careers you are interested in, and so on. Your connections can then share this content with their network, and grow your own network in the process. You should also be active in engaging with the content you see on your timeline, liking and commenting on posts shared by your connections. Completing this three-step guide will help build or strengthen your network and grow as a professional. Begin your plan to grow your network by connecting with me on LinkedIn here.

About Cassie

Cassie Morris is a senior from Royal Oak, Michigan studying marketing (emphasis in distribution and logistics) and advertising and public relations (emphasis in public relations). She loves and strives to be creative in all aspects of her life, and is excited to bring that to PRSSA and GrandPR. Her internship with Hour Media in the summer of 2021 aided her in her desired career path of public relations and event planning. After graduation in December of 2022, she hopes to move to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue a professional career in a related field. A fun fact about her is that she spent two months in Australia and held a platypus while she was there!