​MAEAA LinkedIn Visit and Talk

On 20th June 2019, the MAEAA organized a tour of the Singapore LinkedIn office for 34 MAEAA alumni. The night’s event also consisted of a short seminar on how participants could leverage on their LinkedIn profiles more effectively in the age of digital self-marketing and job-seeking. While organized on a Thursday night, enthusiastic MAEAA alumni participants of the night’s event made their way down to the LinkedIn office in the Marina Bay Financial Centre. After a quick dinner, participants were split into groups and brought on a tour of the office, which covered the few storeys of office space in the LinkedIn office. The office was well designed, the perks of being a LinkedIn employee in this office were attractive, and the compound portrayed the aspects of fun and modernity, set against a fantastic view of Singapore’s Marina Bay area especially during sunset. It is imaginable how vibrant the office compound was during the day time when meeting rooms and discussion pods would be occupied with employees doing their discussions.

After the walk-around, participants convened back to a function room located on the newest renovated office storey of LinkedIn’s office space spanning 3 storeys in total and was introduced to facilitators of the night’s events from LinkedIn. Titled ‘Take Control of Your Personal Brand on LinkedIN, the short seminar was intended to provide new and existing LinkedIn users with tips and tricks to further enhance their LinkedIn account’s viewership and visibility, and to equip them with insights on what page viewers tend to look out for when viewing profiles for potential hires for job openings. Indeed, the seminar started off with insights from the creators of the portal which provided the participants with great value, for example, that an opacity map of a typical LinkedIn profile tells that highest attention is put on the profile photo, short description and self-introduction section of a profile. This guides users to what strategically should be kept updated and uploaded wisely since it gains the typical profile page the most viewership. Members with up-to-date positions also tend to receive multiple times more connection requests, profile views and messages on the professional networking platform, and speakers also shared on how members could update their skills to gain more recruiter searches. The seminar was interactive, where it started with a electronic poll on what users use LinkedIn for, and was also rounded up with a Kahoot quiz which tested participant on whether they have paid good attention to the seminar content and basically who had the fastest finger. Top winner of the night’s quiz was none other than Mr Leong Kok Hou, who is Vice President of the MAEAA Executive Committee, who was presented with a book published by LinkedIn as memorabilia. The question and answer session also saw participants actively posting questions to the LinkedIn representatives and benefiting all others with the responses. It was also great to see alumni staying behind after the event to catch up with friends that they have not met up with in a long time, opportuning this as a networking and gathering event for alumni.

While the night’s event was short, the take-aways were abundant and it sure is an experience and learning that alumni could share with their colleagues or friends who did not managed to attend the event due to limited places. The overwhelming registration rate of the event prompts the MAEAA to organize similar activities for alumni in future and we do hope fellow MAE alumni out there will provide us suggestions on the events, and actively sign up for MAEAA activities to leverage on the networking opportunities among alumni.