Are you a board-certified, multi-lingual academic with a couple of inventions under your belt? If so, you’re in luck, because LinkedIn just added fields to help show off all your over-achievements.
LinkedIn, that online, socially-networked version of your responsible, professional self has listened to its users and begun offering additional profile sections to list publications, languages, skills, certifications and patents. You heard right – patents.
In many ways, LinkedIn just got that much closer to the interactive resumé it’s always tried to be. Each new section comes with a set of pre-defined fields to fill out. For languages, as you type the name of the language a list of suggestions show up, from the standard language to various dialects and variations. Type “e” in the Skills section and “Editing”, among other things, pops up below. Still, it’s all free form and not restricted to their terms, which is a welcome feature.
Each section is pretty self explanatory, allowing users to list their accomplishments and skill-sets. Our favorite sections, however, might be the Patents and Publications sections. In the Patents field, users can list applied-for and received patents, while the Publications section allows users to list academic journals, books, magazines, or whatever else that they’ve been published in. In each, they can even list other authors or inventors they worked with in these endeavors.
We spoke briefly with Mario Sundar, a social media manager with LinkedIn, who told us that this was just the first step and that more would be coming soon. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing how profiles can become more intricately connected and what this new layer will offer in terms of getting a quick background on individuals through their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn already offered a quick way to get background information on people you’re interested in and that background just got a little bit deeper and more layered.
