Happy Mother’s Day & LinkedIn Trick to Expand Your Headline – May 2018

Brand Career Management Monthly Tip Sheet

For some updates, my presentations on salary negotiation at the Maryland Career Development Association and Raising the Bar conferences in April were very well received. It was exciting to share this information with other career professions, knowing they can use it to help their clients.

Also, thanks to everyone who commented, shared, liked my latest post with tips for successful salary negotiation (it was on my site and on LinkedIn). These are some of the ways I am trying to help close the pay gap and I will continue to look for more ways to do so.

Warmest regards,
Paula

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Your Headline Can Be a Little Longer with This Trick
I recently changed my LinkedIn headline. It used to look like this (which is 91 characters with spaces):

Career Counselor ✶, Career Coach ✶,  LinkedIn Trainer ✶, Speaker ✶, Your link to career SUCCESS!

In line with my current focus on empowering women in their careers, I spent time creating a new LinkedIn headline, but my final version was 6 characters over the limit. This had me stuck and I was taking too much time to figure out what could be cut (weeks, really months, were ticking by).

Then I read a great tip by Dennis Koutoudis in his LinkedIn Superpowers Group. As he explained, on the LinkedIn website, you are limited to 120 characters for your headline. However, if you edit it on the mobile app, you get more space. He was able to fit in one with 141 characters. I tried it and it worked. Here’s my new headline (126 characters with spaces):

Global Career Coach & Consultant 🌏, Speaker | Trainer | Facilitator 🌏, LinkedIn Expert 🌏, Empowering Mid-Career to Executive Women

It only took a matter of seconds to do this, once all the pieces were in place. However, there were necessary little steps that take more time to set the stage. First, you must download the LinkedIn App on to your phone. Second, you will need to find the best way to send your drafted sentence to your phone, so you can easily cut and paste it in. In my case, I have Office 365, so I was able to draft it in Word and send it to OneDrive to access on my iPhone.

If you have been putting off updating your headline, maybe this will be your incentive to dust it off and pick it back up again.

The posts below share insights, tips, and data about motherhood and careers.

Let’s start with a LinkedIn post by Amy Henderson, Founding CEO at Tend Lab explaining how motherhood enhanced her ability to develop broader relationships, which led to career success (a trend she sees for other women too).

For those who have taken time off to raise a family, these two posts offer advice and inspiration on getting back to work.

• Shannon Stubo Brayton of LinkedIn shares some excellent tips on easing your transition back to work after taking a career break for child-rearing (though almost all of the tips could be applied to an eldercare situation).
• Camilla Cornell of the Financial Post writes about the Return to Bay Street Award program that reconnects talented mid-career women to their former finance careers.

Finally, Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times share new data about parental influence on the career choices of daughters.

Mark your calendars. I have just finalized plans to speak at the Anne Arundel Public Library Broadneck Branch on Figuring Out Your Next Career Move on Monday, September 17 from 7 pm to 8:30 pm. After August 31^st, you will be able to register for this free session.

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