LinkedIn isn’t working…

As a “professional” I am signed up to LinkedIn.

At the moment the only function I can really see is to increase my connections, of people I once networked with in a professional setting.  Essentially has become some sort of organisation Pokedex where I have to catch them all – or rather got to network with them all.  This usually results in a mundane loop from the newsfeed where I get to see what my network “liked”.

Beyond that I don’t really have a practical use for LinkedIn except as a way of logging my latest experiences, qualifications and being able to subtly brag when I get a promotion  – I certainly aren’t interested in jobs on it.

My organisations policy is that social media should be reserved for lunchtime, however LinkedIn is the exception that is above this policy because it is a professional network, but from what I see LinkedIn is for work purposes but it isn’t actual work!

From using the site during working hours the other day, I spent an hour of work time, looking for new connections. reading pointless posts about business and unprofessional LinkedIn articles complaining about all the unprofessional content on LinkedIn.

Reading a professional guy with a LinkedIn blog, have a unprofessional winge has created zero improvement to my professional development.

So I wasted an hour engrossed reading the comments on an article about International Women’s day, where an employer let all his female employees have the day off while the men continued to work.  Queue endless thread of futile discussion on equality and gender politics.

I can say since becoming a member of LinkedIn:

• It hasn’t contributed to teaching me any new skills that can make me do my job any better
• It hasn’t improved my career or got me new jobs
• It has provided very little articles of interest that are of interest to my profession (actually there are a number of sites I would go to directly for this)

All it has done is produce that warm fuzzy feeling whenever I make a new connection or get a like for my new job.  That must be the dopamine hitting my brain.

I would therefore argue that employers should review encouraging their staff to use LinkedIn throughout the day – how useful is it?  Does it make my staff more productive?  Does it lead to new connections or business leads?

If the answer is an obvious ‘no’ then I would probably suggest that LinkedIn is also included on the list of sites that should be restricted to an employee’s lunch hour.

James