How I put LinkedIn to work for my career as a scientist and entrepreneur

For most of my career, I avoided Linkedin. I preferred online networking on Twitter (now X), where I joined other academics in sharing publications, debating research findings and, most of all, posting memes. But that all changed in 2022, when I decided to leave my postdoctoral fellowship in early-childhood emotional development, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for a career in industry. One of my first steps was to create a LinkedIn profile; I’d never used the platform before.

At first, I didn’t see much value to LinkedIn. I thought it was a fake, self-congratulatory job board — stuffed with endless self-promotion, idiotic ‘grind mindset’ memes and inspirational clichés about hard work (as documented in the subreddit LinkedInLunatics). I filled in my profile, turned on alerts for research positions and chatted to a few PhD holders who worked in industry. In August 2022, I received an offer for a post as a user-experience researcher focused on improving the usability of products at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, based in Menlo Park, California. At that point, I abandoned LinkedIn and returned to Twitter, where I had started to gain a small following. My network grew as I tweeted career advice and met scientists to give informational interviews and provide free CV edits for industry positions.

The power of posting

Following changes to Twitter after its purchase by billionaire Elon Musk, scientists began leaving the platform. I became worried about losing my network of 20,000 followers. I had helped hundreds of scientists with their careers and, in return, I had been invited to give talks at universities and for professional organizations. I enjoyed having a platform. So, in December 2022, I reluctantly returned to LinkedIn, deciding to paste the tweet threads I was already creating into LinkedIn posts. The response was astonishing. I gained 18,000 followers in 30 days; it had taken me nearly a year to hit that number on Twitter.

I spent hours on LinkedIn, writing posts, responding to comments and building a community of industry scientists. Several of my posts appeared in people’s feeds more than one million times — I never had that kind of readership for my scientific papers. I was having a positive impact on other people’s lives, which was the reason I pursued a PhD in the first place.

One new follower was an engineering manager at Arthrex, a medical-device company based in Naples, Florida. He sent me a connection request after reading a post about my work at Meta, in which I compared my industry research on new augmented reality (AR) glasses with my academic research on infant emotional development. The engineering manager was building similar AR solutions for surgeons. A few months later, after surviving a third round of lay-offs at Meta, I wrote a LinkedIn post about the dismal state of big tech and my desire for a change.

The engineering manager commented with a suggestion that I work at a smaller company. “I’m hiring,” he hinted. After a few messages and several rounds of interviews, I was offered a position on his team. If it weren’t for posting about my work on LinkedIn, that opportunity would have never materialized.

Building a business

But LinkedIn didn’t just help me land a job — it opened up a new career path entirely. Inspired by the response to my posts, I hypothesized that scientists would be interested in paid career services. In October 2023, I posted about my plans to create After Academia, a career-development programme. More than 200 people asked if they could join the first cohort, which launched the following month.