LinkedIn creates new application for college students

The professional networking site LinkedIn now has a new program that allows college students to explore career options as they enter the job market.

LinkedIn and PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. collaborated to create Career Explorer, a program that finds job positions within a student’s field of choice, charts a plan to achieve such positions based on the career paths of other LinkedIn users and lets students network with others in that specific field.

PwC is a company that is the largest employer of college graduates and works to help them develop their careers.

“We are dedicated to helping students find the right career path and build successful careers,” said Paula Loop, U.S. and global talent leader for PwC. “In that effort, obviously social media is important and so we actually reached out to LinkedIn and started having this dialogue on how we can work jointly to come to the shared vision of helping students prepare for their future careers.”

PwC is working with 60 schools, including USC, to incorporate the Career Explorer program. Since its release, the Career Explorer function has gotten a fair amount of attention, Loop said.

“Students like it. They can really see what it can show them about their career and career options. I think it’s getting a lot of good buzz,” Loop said.

In addition to connecting students with professionals in their field through LinkedIn’s network, the Career Explorer program helps to develop realistic expectations and goals by giving accurate descriptions and salaries of current jobs and by showing successful career paths of users, she said.

“It gives students an idea of what’s out there and how they should go about it; how they should be thinking about their career,” Loop said.

Although Career Explorer is especially targeted to college students’ needs, the program can be used by people of all ages who are researching potential jobs.

“It’s not specific to those in the business world. It’s for anybody,” Loop said. “From a broader scale, I think it would [be] a benefit to not only people that are considering what their major might be, so what university they might go to, [that has] to have that major and also certainly parents that want to help advise their children.”

Leigh Schneider, a freshman majoring in theatre, said the Career Explorer function seemed like a good tool for students.

“You got to get yourself out there, and as a theatre major, we’re told to go on different websites to network,” Schneider said.

Because LinkedIn memberships are free, Schneider said she thought the Career Explorer program would be an easy way to advance career connections.

However, many other networks are available to students that might be better suited for particular fields, Schneider said. For her major, she has been referred to multiple other sites. As such, the new program might not have a dramatic effect across campus with other networking  opportunities already in play.

“It’s one way to get yourself out there, but it’s not going to replace other ways,” Schneider said.

PwC and LinkedIn are hosting an event on campus today to acquaint students with the new Career Explorer program and to help students with their career development in the Ballroom of the Ronald Tutor Campus Center at 11 a.m..