Establishing Connections on LinkedIn

Everybody talks about how great LinkedIn is so a while back I set up an account to see what everybody was talking about. And that's about as far as I went, I set up an account then didn't really know what to do with it. I found that without connections it's hard to make any use out of it. So that raises the question; how do you establish connections on LinkedIn?

After initially setting up the account, I did not revisit LinkedIn until recently reading a couple of articles praising linkedIn on Tony Karrer's blog . This inspired me to give it another shot and see if I can establish some connections and take advantage of what Tony and others speak so highly of.

Here's what I did to start establishing connections whose expertise I might be able to tap into. First off, I connected with Tony. He has a ton of connections in the educational technology industry and by having him as a connection I am more likely to get a response from other people that he is connections with. The next thing I did to work on meeting more people to establish connections with was to join a few groups. I didn't know this when I first started my account but groups can establish pages with some great social networking features that make it easy to share your knowledge and establish connections with others in your industry. I started off by joining the ASTD, and CLO groups and I think I'll look into the eLearning Guilds group next. Now that I have joined the groups I need to dive into the forums and see what everybody is talking about.

With my newly established and potential LinkedIn connections I hope to learn through others experiences and discover opportunities to improve my career in instructional design and eLearning development. I am currently gainfully employed with a great company but I am always looking for opportunities to gain more experience and LinkedIn is a great tool for this. Please leave a comment if you have any LinkedIn tips and please don't be shy to connect with me on my profile on LinkedIn