Unlike a lot of my peers, I did not have a LinkedIn account coming into university as I personally did not see the importance of a professional online social media account at that time. It wasn’t until working and completing this assignment that I started to recognize and realize the power behind having a LinkedIn account. The first thing that really blew me away with LinkedIn was the amount of features the platform had when I was researching about 10 tips to use LinkedIn effectively. From the ability to connect with people in specific industries to the ability to create a timeline of all your past work experiences chronologically, LinkedIn really has all the tools to help you land a job or connect with people in the industry you want to work in. Creating my LinkedIn profile was quite a struggle for me due to the fact that I really lack work experience. On LinkedIn overall work history is split into two sections work experience and volunteer experience. In each section you are supposed to fill in the company you worked at, the time you worked at the company, your position at the company, and a short description of what you did at the company. Due to the fact that I was heavily lacking in work experience I did my best to extend this section by providing more description of the role I played in the company I worked at.
Formal Report
Brainstorming for this assignment was a very short process for me as this was a problem that both me and the supervisor of the program Brandon Kato has wanted to address for a long time. When I first started preparing and researching for this report, I was fairly confident that I would be able to come up with a solution for this project as I myself once worked in this program and the fact that I have a close relationship with most members of the program. Yet as I began to conduct interviews with both the members of the program as well as the students of the program I started to realize that there quite a few more obstacles to overcome then I originally thought. The first obstacle that I realized really quickly was that the program was extremely lacking in funding and that whatever solution I came up with will have to be one that essentially requires no money involved or else it would just be impossible to execute. The second obstacle that I realized once I started conducting the interviews was that despite the fact that Brandon was in charge of this program, whatever decisions that me and Brandon choose to implement in order to solve the staffing shortage problem will still have to be approved by the Richmond aquatic supervisors. The problem with this is that the Richmond Aquatic special needs program is a free service provided by Richmond Aquatics. This then means that Richmond Aquatics as a whole makes no profit from this program so there is very little incentive for the supervisor of Richmond Aquatics to continue to pour resources into this program as long as the program is able to run effectively.
Peer Review
The peer review process in my opinion is extremely valuable and important section as it immediately highlights the weakness of my LinkedIn account that I missed when I was creating my account. As stated by Jason in his peer review, one of the largest weaknesses in my profile is that I lack work experience in the field that I am currently pursuing so all of my accomplishments and work experience posted on my LinkedIn account has no relation with the field im pursuing. The unfortunate thing about this problem is that this is not an issue I could solve right away and instead I just have to work towards finding a job in the field that I am pursuing right now.
Thank you for reading my reflections,
Eric Chang
Link to peer review: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/11/03/peer-review-for-eric-changs-linkedin/
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