LinkedIn Activities & Experience

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>> Jerome Hardaway: Activity, it shows what you write. As you see, all I write about is AI and junior engineers. And today was very special tear-jerker day for me, I'm a old man. I've been helping people get jobs for ten years, and I'm a little emotional about it. Don't look at me, I'm only allowed to cry once a year, so my tears are all cried up.

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And you get to just check all your activity. Let's go back. Now, your experience. Now, this is something that I've been very serious on working on, focusing on. I've been noticing people when it comes to their experience, they put their job and they put their skills, and that's it, but they do not put what they've actually been working on.

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So what I've started doing is, one of the things for my performance reviews is I started taking out of my performance reviews and putting that and tailoring it for my experience. As you see here, you see that I have worked at Infrastructure as Code. I've used Terraform, I've used GitHub Actions, and I've used Azure AI, I've learned Azure AI domain.

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I've been using GitHub and I've done data engineering, DevOps, and things like that. I put what I've done in the job right here, but usually people, they just say, software engineer, and then they just put whatever they have in here. What's the job description of a software engineer, and done.

[00:01:31]
No, put exactly what you've been doing at the job and involve it over time, right? Every quarter, every time you're done with something, I have a rule where every time our stock divest in Microsoft, I update my LinkedIn, I update my resume, I update my GitHub, I go through everything.

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I audit every component every quarter, right? Because that is what you need to be doing, you have to be serious about taking control of your career. You have to audit. I audit my skills in comparison to the company I'm at, in comparison to the companies I wanna be at, right?

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Right now, there's a lot more computer science interviewing going on in the market. So guess what? Now I'm doing more LeetCode. Ten years, I've never needed LeetCode, but I know that even at the top of the game, they're asking for computer science fundamentals. I don't wanna be, if I do an informational, I wanna be ready.

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I wanna stay ready so I don't have to get ready, right? And some people call it paranoia. I came into tech from the Great Recession, and since then, I've always been a kind of aggressive type when it comes to my career and controlling that narrative. But in this current market, which is kinda like a inside-out recession, when you think of it from $87,000 on up, it's essentially a recession.

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But if you're making $50,000 and below, it's a flush market. You have to start thinking about your career more critically and being more aggressive in having more, tightening the reels on your career a lot more, which is what I really want people to start. I'm hoping people start doing, right?

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Now, I don't have one for everything cuz some things are just so ambiguous, but I have even my LinkedIn Learning. I have one of them. This is a great opportunity where you use AI as well. If you wanna do prompt engineering, go take the things that you're doing, put it in there and be like, hey, yo, can you clean this up, summarize this?

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I am such a big fan of Grammarly. [LAUGH] These days like, y'all, it makes me sound like I'm not a hillbilly from Memphis. This is awesome. I absolutely love it. But I do the Frontend Masters, talk about what I've done at Frontend Masters. I'm explicit. I say the training, the things I do, I do that with all of my experiences.

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I have, as you see, I have paragraphs, every single one. I will go back, and I went back and I literally went all the way to my first job, Air Force. And I was like, let me go and put exactly what I did in the air. I went and got EPRs.

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I went into a box in my attic and got old EPRs that are absolutely useless right now, beyond proving that, hey, I did some wild stuff. And there's one EPR that shows I didn't get a medal in Iraq one time because we were playing. They caught us playing games with the Iraqi kids instead of not connecting with them.

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And so I have a literal bullet on, hey, they refused to give me a medal because I was being nice in Iraq. It's a very weird story that is over whiskey. But yeah, I have that right here, everything that I have right here. For every job, showcase what I did, showcase my value.

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I'm trying to always add value. I wanna make sure people know I'm adding value to every role that I'm at. Even on the contract stuff I do, the Frontend Masters, I'm adding value. I don't think I haven't done that so far as the contract for my record because I don't know exactly how I do so much stuff.

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I don't know where to add that and value it yet, I can't put it concretely. But that's how I do it, I format my education. Now, this is the one place I did put my education at, but I don't put it on my resume, and I do get asked that question.

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But as you see, it's criminal justice. I don't really get asked a lot of questions about that unless I go government, because of the fact that they wanna get your transcriptions and things like that. They wanna get verification of, you went to college. However, you don't have to put it on there, but if you do, that is fine.

[00:06:07]
My degree is useless, I always say I use it to deal with my kids. I just had a new package of dog biscuits arrive, and what you can see in me, check my phone. I've been making sure that the children know, don't overfeed the dogs on treats. Because that's a problem that I have as a dad these days, which is a good problem.

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Certifications, now, we talked about the importance of certifications earlier. One thing that I will also showcase, not all certifications are equal. Like we've said, CompTIA doesn't have the same weight as going through the Microsoft Azure one or the AWS one when you go with that. Same way as, I don't feel like the LinkedIn certifications have the exact same weight as those when it comes to the job interview.

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However, I do feel like the LinkedIn LinkedIn certifications have more weight when it comes to getting rankings in the searches. I have been noticing what I've been calling LEO, which is LinkedIn engine optimization, treating it like its own browser. That the more stuff that you do that is in the ecosystem of LinkedIn, the higher you rank.

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So if you're in the job market and you're going through LinkedIn Learning, get those certifications, add them to your LinkedIn. And now you're gonna start ranking higher for these keywords. And as we saw, they automatically add the key words or the skills you're supposed to be getting to your top skills and they feature them, right?

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So because I did the AI 900 Fundamentals prep course and I got the certification, it automatically added LL embeddings to my skill set even though there's no way they can verify that I have worked with LL embeddings. But because I've done four different courses that involve that, they're like, yeah, you got the certs, LL embeddings is a skill of his now, right?

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Well, the same way as these. Well, they added web like when Lynda.com, I'd probably get rid of these cuz this LinkedIn Learning was Lynda. This is still old school. But when we come here, right, they added skills of web design directly to my LinkedIn. So that's my opinion on these types of certifications.

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We'll go through LinkedIn Learning. I do feel like LinkedIn Learning is a great resource. They've gotten so much better. And with the whole code spaces and artificial intelligence, if you all have not checked it out, it's really, really good now. But the only advantage it has, what I see, is LEL.

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When it comes to the frontend, I still come here. I go different places in life. If I was to go to PHP, I go to one place, I go to frontend, I go one place. If I just wanna hack the system, I go to LinkedIn.