How can high schoolers build an online professional profile? 

Youngsters studying in high school and ready to attend college often don’t know how to make their online impressive enough to further their career. While there are specialised to guide them for creating an eye-catching profile, here are some simple tips that will surely make this exercise a lot easier for your high school student.  

Find your USP and do your research 
Before setting up a professional profile, encourage your youngsters to determine their career goals. For example, if a youngster wants to be a blogger, motivate her to collate everything she has done so far. The next step is to observe how the particular industry that the youngster is interested in, functions. Industry experts should be followed on job portals, personal blogs, journals and other social media platform. The goal is to figure out how they present themselves online, what they share, what are their areas of focus and how they maintain their professional image. 

Create your profile 
Once the research is done over a period of time, guide your youngsters to build their professional profiles on social media handles. Make sure the name should be same across all profiles. The next step is to create a bio that will attract the attention of recruiters. The goal is to be precise and keep it short. Next, help your high schooler click a professional head shot for their profile picture. The objective is to be consistent across all professional accounts. 

Start networking 
Once the profile is set up, it’s time for your youngsters to start using them to their advantage. Ask them to start by following industry experts and peers from the same field and then enhance their network as they proceed. They also need to start following companies in their relevant field to stay up-to-date with job postings. The goal is to update the profiles regularly and keep things fresh.  

Figure out what to share 
Allow your youngster the space to figure out what to share and what to avoid. Ask them to share things that are relevant, share their professional opinions, and proofread what they post, over and over again. More than this, they need to figure out what not to post. The goal is to figure out new, innovative and authentic ways to maintain their professional image.