LinkedIn is evolving its terms and conditions to allow people as young as 13 to have LinkedIn profiles, so that they can start early in life to differentiate between their upcoming professional and personal interactions they often share on platforms like Facebook.
The profiles will be treated differently within LinkedIn to ensure safety including different default settings and also a dedicated and separate area for child members support queries and questions.
This move comes the day after LinkedIn launches its University pages, allowing academia to differentiate, raise brands and profile to engage students for coming years of study, especially important in the UK with the change in fee structures and the amount of overseas student influx.
The University pages functionality will go live on the 12th September and includes a range of familiar functions to help students.
- Career mapping: As such a big data set LinkedIn is able to show you the career paths of philosophy or physics graduates. You can reserve the paths they've taken, where they live and work, what they do, and even the skills they have so that you can see what might be in store for you.
- Worldwide students: As the world becomes an ever smaller place and we seek the utmost for our studies, students increasingly leave their home countries and study overseas at the leading academic institutions in their chosen professional field. The new pages will allow you to find, engage with current staff and alumni to help make your decisions.
- Easy to find alumni: Alumni of institutions will be able to align themselves and their education with that of the college or university. Making their studies more visible and also enabling potential students to reach out and engage with them. This is an evolution of the current functionality which already enables you to find alumni.
- Building your network: As you start your academic pathway you can leverage the relationships you form, the people you meet and build a network in university ready for professional life. Alumni can reconnect with former classmates, and students can pick the brains and build rapport with current and past students, even before they go.
- Updates: Central location for lecturers, staff and students to get updates, news and activities. It can also be used as a forum to ask questions of the audience, gain opinion and engage with both the current staff and student community as well as the alumni.
I am equally sure that LinkedIn never thought that recruiters might find it easier to locates students for roles at the end of their studies with this new functionality either ...
So from September 12, LinkedIn will be making it available to students (aged 13 in the UK and 13 or 14 in other countries) who can use LinkedIn to explore schools, colleges and universities worldwide, expand their understanding of the potential of their studies and the future careers available, and get a great start on building a network that they can leverage to help guide them at every decision point.