Complete Linked In Guide For STUDENTS In 2025

If you are a student and want to make your online presence so that people in your industry know you then LinkedIn is the place where you should start.

Today we are going to talk about how we are going to make our LinkedIn profile more impressive.

For those students who don’t know what LinkedIn is, LinkedIn is a professional network. As we do connect with our friends using Instagram similarly if we want to connect with the professionals of our industry then we use LinkedIn.

There are two major benefits of using linked in, first it is like our online resume, means if we have better LinkedIn profile then it can give us more job opportunities as well as to get the internships, and secondly it sets a personal branding for us. Personal branding means that when we come out of the room, what do the people sitting in the room talk about us?

Basically, what do the people from our field do, who come within our professional network, think about us? So, if we have done a good job in setting our LinkedIn profile, then it shows our positive image.

So it means that LinkedIn profile should be settled up properly. LinkedIn itself says that 87% of the recruiters check your LinkedIn profile before hiring you, that’s why its important to have a good LinkedIn profile.

Why Is LinkedIn Important?

If you are a college student, LinkedIn is the platform where every companies important decision makers are present, the recruitment team that’s going to hire you, the founders of start-ups in which you want to work, the recently funded start-ups about which you dream of working there. 

All these propels are scrolling on LinkedIn, and if you came in front of them, and if you show your expertise on LinkedIn to them, you too can get the opportunity of your dreams.

Your first internship, freelance client, your first job, your first talking session, all this is possible if you are active on LinkedIn and creating content actively about which we are going to talk in this article.

First of all let’s know what’s the specialty of LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is different from all other social media platforms out there, other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc. are existing from long time and a lot of people are making content, whereas on LinkedIn even today very less amount of people are making content consistently and because of that they are getting recognition and discoverability.

Where all other social media platforms are saturated, LinkedIn is that golden opportunity for you by which you can get the discoverability quickly.

Nowadays nobody asks for the pdf of your resume, everyone is asking about your LinkedIn, that’s why your LinkedIn profile should be up to data and professional looking if you want to attract clients and if you want to work with the best companies out there.

So first let’s talk about your LinkedIn profile, whatever you are going to read from here make sure to note it down somewhere and start executing the steps one after another.

Profile picture

The first thing that we have to take special care of is your profile picture. It is the first thing that anyone checks before looking at other things in your LinkedIn profile.

Our Profile picture should be professional looking. When setting up your profile picture LinkedIn will show you some pictures which you can take as a reference and your profile picture should also look somewhat similar.

The picture you are going to use as your profile picture should be solo (not a group photo), recent photo, along with that front facing photo in which your full face is visible.

A very simple rule of thumb is to click a picture of you in which you are moderately smiling and you are wearing professional clothes, it could be a normal shirt, it could also be a suit.

While taking your picture make sure it’s a headshot, means it should be visible to your chest line. You can use a website named profile pic maker to make your profile picture more professional.

LinkedIn itself says that if your profile is having a profile picture then the chances are drastically higher so that you get clicked.

To simply upload your profile picture you can follow the steps:

• Go to your LinkedIn profile 
• Click on your profile picture and 
• Click on upload profile

Banner

Banner on LinkedIn represents our area of interest or our field. Banner tries to set context for our profile.

So whatever you are interested in, you can set banner related to it. For example if you are interested or related to software engineering you can set your profile banner related to coding.

If you want to create your profile banner you can simply use canva.com.

Headline

Another important thing for your profile is going to be the headline. While writing headline of your profile most of the students make mistakes. 

According to one of the recent stat, on average any recruiter does not spend more than 7 seconds on your profile. So, when they are just spending only 7 seconds your profile headline is going to be very important if you want to standout.

And the biggest mistake people make when they are making their LinkedIn profile is to have a very average, boring looking headline.

source: Ishan sharma

Understand one thing, you are there to stand out from the millions of profiles that the recruiter is looking at. And if you want to stand out you have to write a catchy headline that makes you different from all the other profiles.

Stop writing “Student at XYZ College”. Maybe you are a nextJs developer, maybe you are really interested in VR, or maybe you love to talk about influencer marketing, all these things should be in your headline. You can put this pipe symbol “|” and you can put multiple things.

If you send connection request or recommendation request to anyone on LinkedIn, most of them will look first at the headline of your profile even before the profile picture.

Now moving ahead let’s talk about the

Contact Info

There is a simple button as “contact info”, you need to make sure that you make it easier than ever before then anyone to contact you, it could be your email, or phone number. Make sure its present there otherwise you are going to miss the opportunities.

It sounds simple, but a lot of people don’t add their contact info, resulting in losing them so many opportunities.

Now let’s talk about your;

Featured Section

This is a part of your profile where you can add all the highlights of your career, like the projects you have did, or which internships you have done. All the crucial posts about your career, you can mention them in your this section, so that if anyone goes through your profile they can immediately what are the highlights of your career so far.

This is very important, as people don’t have time for these things you have to impress them in first 7 seconds itself.

Moving on we have the;

About Section

About section is a place where you can write your whole journey. Use bullet points, use short 2-3 line paragraphs and explain from where you have started your life, what are your experiences, what skills you have mastered, and what all do you offer to the businesses that you want to work with.

At the end of your about section you can also mention your email address, so that the chances of you getting opportunities will increase exponentially.

Below your contact info there are two more buttons,

1. Open To

You can configure this button by which you can tell the recruiter what is it that you are looking for, like are you looking for remote internship, the skills you want to work on, what salary you expect etc. you can mention it over there and whenever a recruiter is screening through different profiles, your profile will get selected automatically.

2. Provide services

Another part of your profile, where you can write down what services you can offer to different companies or businesses as a freelancer or consultant.

Let’s understand it from the company perspective, any company that goes on LinkedIn >> services, and they want to work with freelancers or consultants, let’s say they searched for block chain developer consultant, and if you have mentioned in services section that you want to work as a consultant in block chain development, your profile will start ranking over there on top. They will start reading your services section and can reach out to you.

This is a very powerful tool through which you can get a lot of opportunities, so make sure you use this services section in your profile.

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Now let us talk about the next section which is going to be

Experiences Section

Experiences section is that part of your profile where you can write all your past experiences like the companies that you have worked in, like if you have worked in a company as a marketing manager you can write in detail about what impact you have delivered there.

Now this is a very important thing because a lot of people who are looking at your profile want to see what work you have done and just writing that you know I’ve been a software developer at Xyz Company doesn’t matter, you should write what code base you worked on, what changes you implement, what projects you worked on and how much impact it had on the company.

Experience section is very important because here you are writing your SEO keywords, you are also telling your experience and what impact you are creating in the company you are also mentioning that. Make sure that you write it for every single experience that you had.

source: ishan sharma

If you can add any kind of links or put pictures, so please put that. So, that people get more and more information about what work you have done exactly.

After this comes your,

Skills Section

In the skills section you can write down every skill that you have and the best part is people can endorse you for those skills. 

There is another thing called as Test that you can give on LinkedIn through which you will get a verified batch for that particular skill. It will ask you some questions like how much expertise you have in that particular skill and it will give you multiple MCQ type questions and will evaluate it. If you pass that test you will get a verified batch. This is another important feature which allows you to show the recruiter you know what you are writing.

Next comes,

Licenses and Certifications

If you have done any course or you have got any certifications related to that course then you can link those certificates in this section. And that can be a great thing to show your recruiter that you know about that thing.

Connecting With People On LinkedIn

Now when you have a good LinkedIn profile, like you have added profile picture, headline, open to, services, about, experiences, and all other things related.

Now let us talk about connecting with people on LinkedIn. First thing that you need to implement is going to be your first 1000 connections on LinkedIn.

Now, why this is important because if you have 0 connections on your LinkedIn profile, no one would want to connect with you, your profile will almost look fake.

source : Jason Huard

The best thing you can do, suppose you are a college student so what you can do is like you can send a connection request to your batch mates. Also, Connect with all of the college alumni that you have.

Apart from this the skills you are interested in, like you are a developer, marketer, just search about that and start connecting with those people who are related to your niche. What will happen with this is like you will get a connection pool of people who are highly concentrated in your particular domain.

So you can learn a lot from them and the connections they have are also open for you. LinkedIn works on a chain connection basis. There is a theory which says that anyone on LinkedIn is just 7 connections away and if you connect with more people, you get those connections closer.

Whenever on LinkedIn you connect with someone they become your 1st-degree connections. The second person who is connected to that connection of you becomes 2^nd degree connections. Then comes 3^rd degree and 3^rd degree plus. These are the people that are not connected with you in your particular circle. So your goal should be to reduce it as much as possible by connecting with as many people as possible.

Every day just send 50 to 60 connections and in about one month you will have close to 1000 connects.

One tip whenever you are connecting with people on LinkedIn is that when you will send them connection request always add a note if they are someone very important that you want to connect with. Then in the note write, this is who I am, just write one single line and this is what I want from you. There is no need to talk about here and there, as there is a limit so make sure that you ask what you want to ask.

Once they accept your connection request, then you can start talking to them in the DM’s.

DM’s on the LinkedIn is a powerful tool through which you can talk to many people and Unlock many opportunities for yourself.

Lets say you connect with someone on LinkedIn, you will get notified via your email that this person has accepted your LinkedIn request after that send them a message.

If you have to talk on LinkedIn with someone via messages then you have to take care of few things:

1. You will first address them like Hello Puja or Hello Raj (use their name).
2. First two lines should be about the context like who you are and what you do, that’s it. Don’t make it a paragraph or story just move to the next point.
3. This point is going to be about your ask, like what you want.

Let’s wrap up this part of this article by a simple note, if you are a designer so connect with likeminded people who are also designers, who are at a similar stage in your life and in their career. Connect with them, get on a call with them. 

Genuinely connect and see how you can both work. DON’T LOOK FOR FRIENDSHIPS LOOK FOR ALLIANCES. How can you both work and offer services to clients and charge even more money, that’s what your mindset should be about.

Conclusion

Well there is a lot more to explore about the LinkedIn but we have talked about the most important things which you should consider about the LinkedIn as a student.

So, this was our Complete LinkedIn guide for students and as we mentioned that you should take care of few things while setting up your LinkedIn profile as a student.

After completing all these things properly then you can read  about "How to connect with people on LinkedIn" this will help you to connect with people of your industry easily.

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